Martin Parr's 40 years in the life of Wales: 'Let's face it – people are funny'

What do Martin Parr’s photographs of Wales tell us about the country, its past, its present and its future? “Nothing much,” Parr replies in a deadpan voice when I pose the question. It’s not quite the response I was anticipating, given that he has been photographing the country for 40 years now and his best shots are about to go on show at the National Museum in Cardiff. But then Parr has spent five decades confounding and wrong-footing – if not actually deflating – people’s expectations of his work.

“It’s a coincidence they’re all taken in Wales,” he says. “It’s not like I’ve gone out to capture Wales. They’re just pictures that happen to have been taken in Wales, and therefore by default are a portrait or interpretation of the country. There are places that aren’t represented, but that’s the point really. These are the pictures I’ve come across.”

This may be disingenuous. I hail from south Wales, where most of the photographs in the exhibition were taken, and could quickly identify with the bank holidays at the beach under leaden skies, the delight of middle-aged women on nights out – you can almost hear them singing Delilah. These are people just getting by, having a brief epiphany in the sun at Llandudno, or embarking on an evening of wild abandon at a working men’s club in Llantrisant. Then there’s what can only be described as the celebration of awful food: beans, milkshakes, extravagantly coloured cupcakes, faggots and mushy peas drowning in gravy.

Why the obsession with food? “If you go into a posh restaurant now, everyone is photographing food,” says Parr. “I was on the case early. Food says a lot about who we are and what we’re doing. If you go to a supermarket and look at the food on the packet and then open it up, it never looks the same. We’re being fed these lies constantly about how the world is represented. It’s a great opportunity to subvert that.”

Parr is sitting at a low table piled high with photographs when I arrive at his office in Bristol. These are pictures of recent protests (pro-Brexit, anti-Brexit, climate crisis) that might eventually find their way into a book: Parr on Protest, perhaps. The photographer has produced more than 100 books in his 45-year career – extended photo-essays exploring such subjects as tourism, consumerism and class. As for Wales, it’s not far from Bristol – and anyway, Parr has a holiday flat overlooking his beloved beach at Tenby, on the country’s south coast.

The first photograph in the show is a black-and-white image from 1975 of a bemused middle-aged couple at the summit of Snowdon, evidently wondering what they should do now. As ever with Parr’s work, there is a twist, a trace of sardonic humour: the woman appears to have brought several handbags on the ascent. There are also a few photographs of Tower Colliery near Aberdare, the oldest continuously working deep mine in the UK until its closure in 2008.

The shots of this vanished world come as a surprise after the cakes and beaches, especially the picture of miners marching in protest at closures, the show’s sole explicitly political note. But even in his set of mining photographs, Parr catches the sheer oddness of life, photographing one blackened miner drinking a cup of tea in an austere room brightened only by a Christmas tree sitting on the table. Another case of getting by in challenging circumstances.

Parr’s photographs are often witty. In another shot, a butcher’s arm echoes the strings of sausages in his shop window. “I like humour,” says Parr. “We learn a lot by listening to standup comics. The vulnerability they often express has an overlap with the vulnerability I’m looking for in my own work. The world is funny, let’s face it, and people are funny.”

Parr, who is 67 and was born in Epsom, Surrey, says his Welsh photographs should be seen in the context of a lifelong project to document the whole of Britain, an endeavour now reaching an even larger audience thanks to the “idents” he has done for BBC One. As they draw breath between programmes, viewers are treated to Parr’s clips of like-minded people coming together: potholers, bhangra dancers, kayakers, lifeguards, junior footballers, female boxers, wheelchair-using rugby players, bog snorkellers.

“My affection for Wales is very high,” says Parr. “But my preoccupation is with the United Kingdom. I recently did a book on Scotland.” There will be a show there, too, in Aberdeen. “It’s a phase I’m going through. Next year I’ll be doing an Irish book because I’ve spent a lot of time there as well.”

His Bristol HQ, The Martin Parr Foundation, opened in 2017 and houses not only his own archive of more than one million images but the work of other postwar British documentary photographers. The foundation puts on shows, organises talks and publishes books. Its latest volume is a tribute to Tony Ray-Jones, a pioneering British photographer who died in 1972 at the age of 30.

Ray-Jones also loved beaches and captured their quirky Britishness in arresting black and white. Parr, who regards the beach as a great democratic space where people truly express themselves, took his stylistic cue from Ray-Jones, then led the move to saturated colour photography with his breakthrough exhibition and book The Last Resort in 1986. He says he was applying the techniques used in advertising to documentary photography – and has now not merely become a photographic institution but opened one, employing 10 hyper-energetic young people at his foundation.

The Last Resort, which photographed daytrippers to New Brighton on Merseyside, was criticised by some as patronising. These critics might feel the same way about Parr’s photographs of the Welsh working class. A shot in the Cardiff show, of a boy being fed beans and chips, seems to echo his famous photograph of two children in New Brighton standing at a kerb luxuriating in their gooey ice creams. “I’m pretty democratic when it comes to classes,” is all he will say in response to such criticism. “I’ve done them all – though it’s more difficult to identify a posher class in Wales.”

When Parr applied to be a full member of the celebrated Magnum photo agency in 1994, his application was opposed by photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths, famous for his pictures of the Vietnam war. Jones Griffiths believed in photography as an agent of social change. Parr, he argued, “has always shunned the values that Magnum was built on. Not for him any of our concerned ‘finger on the pulse of society’ humanistic photography.”

Jones Griffiths believed Parr’s membership would be a repudiation of everything Magnum stood for. But in the end, Parr wasn’t just elected – he went on to serve as president of the agency for four years, suggesting he won not just the battle but the war. It shows Parr’s steeliness that he rode out both that attack and another from the great French photographer (and Magnum co-founder) Henri Cartier-Bresson, who claimed Parr’s work was “from another planet”.

“If I hadn’t got into Magnum,” says Parr, “it wouldn’t have been the end of the world because I was relatively established. But I liked the challenge, and I liked the concept of Magnum. Since then, many other photographers have come in and the agenda has somewhat loosened.”

Parr talks me through his picture of a queue for an ice-cream van on the beach at Tenby, a shot he is particularly pleased with. His beach pictures are full of the sort of mini-dramas his idol Ray-Jones specialised in. The same could be said of that couple surveying Snowdon. You really do want to know what conversation they’re having: “Is this all there is?”

“I just show things as I find them,” says Parr innocently. “It’s not a journalistic statement. It’s a personal statement. You could argue it’s fiction based on reality – my interpretation of the world.”

• Martin Parr in Wales is at National Museum Cardiff, 26 October to 4 May.