{"id":435,"date":"2008-11-03T20:55:35","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T20:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=435"},"modified":"2008-11-03T20:55:35","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T20:55:35","slug":"wacky-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/?p=435","title":{"rendered":"Wacky UK?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent the last weekend away from home, staying at a friend’s house in the north-east, where we had gone to celebrate his 90th birthday with a surprise party – with more friends coming from London and Sheffield for the event. Despite the misgivings of one of his neighbours – “What are you trying to do, kill him<\/em>?” she asked –\u00a0 it went off well;\u00a0 we had after all known him for at least twice as long as her.<\/p>\n

But being away from home, and in weather so poor I didn’t feel like going out anywhere with a camera left me plenty of time to read the papers, and in the Guardian Weekend Magazine I found a feature on ‘Martin Parr<\/em>‘s Britain’, with 12 pages mainly of pictures from a lengthy project by him for the paper covering 10 English cities.<\/p>\n

Parr was a photographer I admired greatly in the 1970s, although I’ve found some of his later work not entirely to my taste. He’s made a enviable reputation for himself, as well as a not so small fortune from his photography, but does sometimes seem to be cruising on that reputation rather than producing work of any consequence.\u00a0 And although there were a few pictures I admired in the feature, as a whole it left me thinking that far from\u00a0 (in the Guardian’s words) capturing “the essence of Britain\u0092s cities” what we had was a few assorted glimpses of the wacky extremes of British (mainly English) eccentricity rather than any serious attempt to tackle the ostensible subject. It did really seem to be a good example of taking the easy way out, and I thought about writing a serious blog post about the work.<\/p>\n

Perhaps fortunately I don’t need to, because Simon Roberts<\/em> has done a very good job already. Although my thoughts would differ in detail, his UNDERWHELMED BY PARR<\/a> raises some of the same thoughts that I had, mainly in quotations from letters on the Guardian web site, where you can see rather more of his project than appeared in Saturday’s magazine in a slide show called Pies, parties and pink drinks<\/a>. Despite the joky title, this is a considerably better edit than that which appeared in the magazine.<\/p>\n

Roberts of course has a certain competitive interest in the subject, having this year been engaged in his project ‘We English<\/a>‘, supported by the National Media Museum, Arts Council England<\/em> and The John Kobal Foundation<\/em>, which he describes as ” a photographic journal of life in England in 2008<\/em>“. At the moment if you click on the ‘GALLERY’ link at the top of this page it leads only to a picture of him with a page of biographical information. Perhaps when this emerges as the promised book and exhibition of 36×48\u0094 landscape prints in Autumn 2009, Martin Parr can be tempted to review it.\u00a0 Having so far only seen the two pictures in a Foto 8 feature<\/a> I might well find Parr’s work of greater interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent the last weekend away from home, staying at a friend’s house in the north-east, where we had gone to celebrate his 90th birthday with a surprise party – with more friends coming from London and Sheffield for the event. Despite the misgivings of one of his neighbours – “What are you trying to … Continue reading Wacky UK?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo-issues","category-photographers","category-reviews-etc"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-photo.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}