It’s only fitting that Martin Parr’s exhibition of
photographs of Dunoon is being held in the town’s recently reopened Burgh Hall.
A decade ago, what is now a B listed building was rescued from demolition by
the local community, who worked with the John McAslan Family Trust, set up by
locally born architect McAslan, to purchase it from property developers Fyfe
Homes for a token £1.
A few years earlier, Parr and McAslan, whose work has
included the 2006 restoration of railway engine shed turned London
counter-cultural fun palace the Roundhouse, teamed up after veteran
photographer Parr included some of McAslan’s personal collection of postcards in
his book, Boring Postcards. The project that resulted, Light along the A8
corridor, was a road-trip of sorts that saw the pair navigate their way between
Port Glasgow and a once-thriving Dunoon.
As they travelled, Parr documented the local colour
along the route to what Visit Scotland describes as ‘the main resort on the
beautiful Cowal Peninsula and the maritime gateway to the Loch Lomond and
Trossachs National Park’ in all its mundane everyday glory. This gave rise to
the book, A8, which featured 28 images by Parr, the titles of which - Cowal Games, Craigen Tea Room, Daisy’s Den –
only hinting at the unruly bustle of life barely contained within.
Almost a decade on from the sale, and with tireless
work from the Dunoon Burgh Hall Trust, the building reopened in 2017 as a fully
functioning artistic resource for the local community.
In keeping with this confluence of old and new, Martin
Parr’s Dunoon is something of a pilgrimage that takes stock of some of the
original A8 pictures seen alongside new work.
“I was invited to do more, and came up over six or
seven weekends,” says Parr of the revisitation. “Dunoon’s still basically the
same place. Its economy isn’t in great shape, because it relied on tourism, and
that’s in decline. But it’s still ticking away. There’s still lots of life
there, and it’s great that the Burgh Hall has reopened. Without John that would
never have happened.”
Such personal input to his images of Dunoon is typical
of Parr, who first came to prominence
in the mid-1980s with the publication of The Last
Resort: Photographs of New Brighton. The book documented a series of
photographs taken in the rough and tumble leisureland of New Brighton, the
faded Merseyside seaside town which, in its cheerfully low-rent, kiss-me-quick
splendour, offered some kind of brief respite for Liverpool day-trippers
seeking sanctuary from the ravages of the 1980s recession.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, who documented
various urban wastelands in gritty black-and white, Parr showed his studies of
communities at work, rest but largely play in living and often wilfully garish
warts-and-all colour. This gave his candid slices of life a vivid sense of the
bodies in rest and motion that populated them. It is perhaps telling that in
the early years of his career Parr worked as a roving photographer at seaside
holiday camps, where the working class were captured with some of the largesse
of the picture postcards they sometimes seemed to mirror.
Some of Parr’s early pre-occupations and insightful
thoughts on photography in Documentary Photography: Asset or Liability?, a talk
Parr gave at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh in 1987. A recording of the talk is
being released online as part of a series drawn from the gallery’s rich past to
commemorate its fortieth anniversary. Listening to the Parr of three decades
ago is akin to tuning in to a fascinating time capsule, in which he holds court
on such topics as the subjectivity of documentary photography and how there is
“no such thing as documentary truth” and photography’s seeming inability to
change the world.
In 1987, of course, while photography was already a
more accessible and democratic means of expression than most, it was a long way
from the sort of mass ubiquity that the digital age brought with it. This came
by way of camera phones, Instagram and other click-of-a-switch online
platforms. Parr embraces the opportunities such new technology brings with it,
and has his ow Instagram account.
“It’s still photography at its core,” he says, “but it
means that the audience for photography is much bigger.”
One of the Parr’s most striking comments during the
talk comes towards the end of the recording, when he talks about his then impending
move to Bristol, where he will effectively be photographing a more middle class
strata of society than those in Liverpool and Ireland, where he previously
lived and worked. Crucially, he talks about how people were becoming more selfish.
Given that this was arguably still in the relatively early days of an
increasingly broken Britain we are perhaps only now feeling the full fall-out
from, thirty years on, Parr’s words sound like prophecy.
“Will you be saying I’m a visionary?” he jokes.
Beyond Dunoon, Parr has at least one major exhibition
in the pipeline, and there will also be a book of space dog ephemera. This
latter project is drawn from one of several of Parr’s collections that go
beyond photography, and which here encompass anything connected with the Soviet
space programme in the 1950s and 1960s, which sent dogs into space to determine
whether human space-flight was possible.
All of which acts as a conduit and a continuum for
Parr’s main interest.
“Leisure,” he says. “Whether it’s a flower show or a
concert or people playing bowls, leisure is my main pursuit.”
Martin Parr’s Dunoon runs at Dunoon Burgh Halls until
April 15th. Documentary Photography: Asset or Liability will form
part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of Stills Gallery,
Edinburgh, and will be available online.
Scottish Art News, Summer 2018
ends
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