Martin Parr and the Legacy of British Colonial Photography

Abstract

British contemporary photographer Martin Parr’s collection 7 Colonial Still Lifes (2005) delivers banal and benign images of remnants of British colonisation in Sri Lanka. While Parr’s early collection The Last Resort (1986) was harshly critiqued for its judgmental lens on the working-class British, some identified a contemporary ‘othering’ in Parr’s imagery. This line of reasoning was not explored to its fullest extent. Forming a postcolonial reading, I argue that what Parr’s critics have missed (or dismissed) is the historical legacy of British colonial photography. The images from The Last Resort bear a striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century British colonial photographer John Thomson’s collection Street Life in London (1877). Thomson is the first street photographer to reverse the colonial lens back on to his own people with similar results. However, in his still life photographs Parr trains his probing critical lens on empire itself, with much more successful results.