The Cost of Living is Martin Parr's latest, and perhaps most ambitious project. Since graduating from Manchester Polytechnic in the early 70s, he has favoured working in series, three of which have previously been published in book form: Bad Weather in 1982, A Fair Day (images of West Ireland) in 1984, and The Last Resort (photographs of New Brighton on Merseyside) in 1986. Together these projects have helped build his considerable reputation and (together with his teaching, at West Surrey College of Art and Design) have exerted a wide influence over a new generation of documentary photographers, contributing to the recent development of new approaches to colour photography in Britain. In 1988 Parr was elected a nominee of the Magnum photographic agency.
With The Cost of Living, Parr has opted to return to his native south of England, and his own background: the works represent a sustained enquiry into the 'comfortable' middle classes, who he sees, at least in terms of photographic coverage, as Britain's 'silent majority'. As with his previous work, he departs from a conventional documentary approach in presenting uncaptioned images, which work together to build up a picture of range of attitudes rather than a record of specified places, people or events. The challenge has been to find a stimulating and appropriate visual imagery for this amorphous theme. His scrutiny is close yet shifting, attempting to trace a line which avoids the dangers of caricature and stereotype that have always dogged visual representations of the British class system. But the subject is a vast one, and Parr is not so rash as to claim any firm or objective conclusions from the work. Its value rests firmly in its presentation of a coherent and original artist's view rather than in its informational content.
Parr's now familiar style (seen to greatest effect in The Last Resort) with its use of close-up and flash and its emphasis on visual complexity and on contingency, here gives way at times to a new, firmer, more studied image. Parr's attention ranges from Conservative fundraising sales to craft fairs and open days, from the artificial ski slope to the Sainsbury's checkout. He alights on and combines the significant or conflicting gestures which signal the unease of a social occasion, or the minutiae of setting which point to a range of carefully cultivated pretensions; and he exploits the artificiality of intense or evocative colours provided by the trappings of newly-gained affluence.
Parr's new works are unsettling; they provoke a mixed, though rarely a neutral, response. His stance, for all its equivocation, verges on the pessimistic; he presents us with a world in which cameras are ever at the ready but eye contact between strangers is avoided, where the wallet slides readily from the pocket of the tweed jacket - where social gathering merges with point of sale as attention is fixed most avidly on that which can be possessed or consumed.
The Cost of Living is a touring exhibition organised by the Royal Photographic Society, Bath, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, and is sponsored by Kodak. A book of the same title, with a text by Robert Chesshyre, is published by Cornerhouse Publications.
For further information on this and past exhibitions, visit our Archive and Study Room.