I Am Martin Parr: 'enormously entertaining' documentary on 'jolly' photographer

The output of the photographer Martin Parr has a flavour of both "seaside-postcard artist Donald McGill and Alan Bennett, with a bit of American street photographer Vivian Maier and a sliver of Diane Arbus" thrown in, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

His "beguiling work" – particularly the portraits he took in the 1970s and 1980s of the white working-classes on holiday – is the subject of this "brief but thoroughly enjoyable" documentary, which features interviews with Parr himself, as well as various talking heads. Hard work and "eternal vigilance" are crucial to his craft, we learn, but so is his gift for "looking like an ordinary bloke": we watch him meander through a crowd, "smiling benignly" as he snaps away, exuding a normality that Grayson Perry calls his "camo".

"Like its subject and his work", this "enormously entertaining documentary" does its job "superbly and without fuss", said David Hughes in Time Out. But while it builds a "persuasive case" that Parr is one of the "great social documentarians" of our age, the man himself proves "elusive, resisting self-analysis and preferring to let the work speak for itself". It falls to Perry to note that Parr has so inveigled his way into our subconscious that someone described the late Queen's jubilee celebrations as being "like Martin Parr day".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Like Parr, the film is "jolly" but quite "inscrutable", agreed Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. A light touch is even applied, for instance, to the much- debated question "of whether Parr is laughing at or with his subjects". On that "puzzle", the film "shrugs and smiles. Parr too. 'People are funny,' he says, vanishing back behind the camera."