A year ago I sat in a small, white photographic studio in a converted shophouse in Singapore, surrounded by photographs of Chinese grandmothers, Buddhist temples and black and white images of the bark of those impossibly wide Banyan Trees which have spread their roots for hundred of years deep into that tiny island. The aircon unit in the room fought with the outside humidity as our teacher, Getty photographer CJ Wadhwa, introduced us to the different genres of photography. As he explained the concept behind documentary photography, he picked up a thick, earthy brown Phaidon copy of Martin Parr’s work and his showed us a few pages of Parr’s early black and white images.

In that instant he sent me straight back home to Yorkshire and to the photograph albums that lie in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. In that small, sticky studio on the other side of the world I could feel the chill of the snow lying thick upon the Pennine Moors, hear the shivers of the church goers in their heavy woollen coats awaiting the start of the Sunday service and I recognised the back streets of Leeds where my grandparents lived and my parents grew up. It was all there. This book, a document of Northern English history was so very familiar to me whilst remaining totally foreign to every other person in the room. My Pennine Moors were their Banyan trees.

PARRWORLD at The Baltic introduces Martin Parr’s new series of work, Luxury, his wry and glorious commentary on the trappings of success – and excess – at the start of the 21st Century. The photographs here are a far cry from his early stark black and white shots across the Yorkshire Moors and, indeed, they seem to be a far cry from the world of global recession, cash strapped times and make do and mend. For the past five years Martin Parr has quietly and unassumingly inserted himself into the midst of the lives of the global jet set, traveling from Dubai to Durban, Miami to Russia, and in doing so he has gained access to the fascinatingly decadent high life of some of the world’s most privileged people.

Parr follows women dollied up to the nines at the horse racing, their ample flesh spilling out from satined corsetry, their heads bobbing with exotic fascinators as one hand clutches a delicate handbag and the other balances a can of lager. In one photograph he captures the mesmorising saucer-like grey green eyes of an exotic cat which outsparkle and outshine the pendant of clustered rubies it wears around its neck. In another, he draws our eyes to the overly tanned skin of a sunbathing mother as she reclines on a sunbed at a ski resort by contrasting her upturned face with the pale, smooth complexion of the baby asleep on her chest. Russian women in cumbersome fur hats, their facial expressions erased by a killer combination of surgery and sunglasses, are framed beside very British gents decked out in top hats and tails, their Thomas Pink ties flapping in the warm English summer breeze. In an image from an international art fair we see one man’s figure almost disappear into the painting he is examining as his flamboyant shirt almost exactly matches the work before him. From Parr’s view, even the man’s white hair seems to camouflage within the image on the wall and, on viewing the photograph, you could almost imagine Parr’s inner squeak of joy as the two patterns before him merged together to make his image.

PARRWORLD

There is a quote from Martin Parr on the wall outside the second gallery which says ” I have a very strong collecting gene”. This a cause for rejoicing as his collection encompasses hundreds of fascinating, amusing and provocative cultural and social items of reference, from mugs celebrating the first moon landing to a display case filled with watches bearing the face of Saddam Hussein. One of the most moving displays is a wall filled with ceramic plates celebrating and commemorating the many coal mining pits of the country and naming those people from each pit who struggled through the miner’s strikes of the 1980’s. Some of the newer additions to the Parr treasure trove are packs of President Obama condoms, a pair of Obama flip flops and a packet of Obama O’s breakfast cereal. An unexpected joy of the PARRWORLD collection is that Parr’s own private collection of photographs is included. Thus Becher’s ‘Cooling Towers’ sit in the same gallery as Rinko Kawauchi’s ‘Utatane’ koi carp and Koshi Yoshikuki’s prowlers in ‘The Park, Tokyo’. Cartier- Bresson’s riverside picnic is in the same space at Joan Fontcuberta’s Googlegram of the torture at Abu Ghraib. A whole coffee table full of beautiful photography books is alive and on display.

Martin Parr has an absolute eye for what makes England English. With Luxury he also shows that the English point of view is a happy travel companion. The photographs in the series remind me of that particularly caustic brand of wit with which the English are blessed, “Would you look at her ..” “What is she wearing …” “Who does he think he is ..”, each comment disguising a touch of envy and wonder at ‘how the other half live’. What shines through the series is a humanity in that, if you could take away the mink hats, the designer sunglasses, the Jermyn Street suits and if you could even picture the faces before the botox and the years of sunbeds what actually lies just beneath the Luxury are people, people who in actual fact, are not really that different to us.