A Fair Day

Fintan O'Toole, who has written the text for a book of photographs of the West of Ireland, writes here about the photographer and his art.

The first time I saw Martin Parr's photographs was when some of them were used with an article I did for In Dublin magazine in 1981. The article was about Paschal Mooney and the Irish Country and Western inndustry, some sort of attempt to look at the Americanisation of Ireland. The photographs were images of the Mayyflower Ballroom in Drumshanbo, Paschal Mooney's home territory, and they were saying something about the West of Ireland that had not been said before. There was one photograph of a line of cars glinting in the ball-

room carpark, looking like a scene from one of those films about the American mid-West. And the life of the ballroom on the inside was pictured in a way that looked at once incredibbly strange and instantly recognisable. Two years later when I was asked to write a text for a book of Martin Parr's photographs of the Irish west, A Fair Day, I was to see a whole succcession of such images, building into a startling picture of modern Ireland.

Like most people I had always thought of photography with a certain ambiguity. The photographs around us often seem so mechanical, so much a reflection of the mere surface of reality, that it was hard to know if they could be regarded as "art" at all. On the other hand there were the images used in advertising, images of pure fantasy which get away from reflecting reality only by distorting and manipulating it. Martin Parr's photographs seemed a long way from both categories. Anyone who lives in Ireland could recognise the scrupulous accuracy with which he had captured the people and events in his photoographs, yet at the same time they seemed alien, weird, coloured by some highly individual vision. Looking at them you could see that he had made the world of the West look strange, not out of any artistic caprice, but beecause it is indeed strange in ways that we have only begun to realise. The curious clash of images in Martin Parr's photographs is a reflection of a very curious clash of cultures which is at the heart of rural Ireland now.

Martin Parr would insist on the term "documentary" as a description of his work. He lectures at the school of documentary photography at Newwport College in Wales and the sense of discipline, accuracy and responsibility which he brings to his work marks him off from the pure deployment of technique which constitutes much of "art" photography. Yet it was clear to me looking at the photographs in A Fair Day that they were as much a vision as a record, as much concerned with making a point about modern Ireland as with reflecting what is going on here. When I started to watch Martin Parr at work I began to see something of the extraordinary mixture of detachment and involvement that makes this possible.

For Martin Parr it is the overall project, that point of view, that makes sense of the individual images in his Open Air Mass, Kinlough, Co. Leitrim. work. In other words he knows what he is looking for while remaining open to events as they occur. I watched him at a horse fair in Westport, for innstance, and he was at the same time highly visible, a tall figure with a Leica 35mm hung outside his anorak, and yet almost invisible, fading into the general commotion, unobtrusive and never interfering. He does not take part in the situation he is recording, so that it is as far as possible a genuine record, nor does he treat people as mere objects by sneaking up on them unawares. His method works because he brings to it both a carefully connstructive knowledge of the community in which he is working and a punishing discipline which makes him willing to stand for hours in the early morning of a West of Ireland winter in the hope, often vain, that the image he wants will finally appear.

On the face of it it seemed to me strange that someone brought up in the suburban world of Epsom in Surrey; where Martin Parr was born in 1952, could have such an exact underrstanding of the tensions and contraadictions which make the west of Ireland what it is today. But his life as a photographer has been an unusually consistent quest. From his childhood when he watched his grandfather, an avid amateur, print up pictures in his darkroom, photography has gripped him. The obsession took him from the sedate South of England to the harder North, where he studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic. The North of England, like the West of Ireland, was in the throes of change, the sort of change which throws up visual images of incongruity and decline. In 1975 he moved to Hebden Bridge, an old mill town in West Yorkshire with a dying Non-Conformist community which he spent the next few years documenting. His move to the west of Ireland, where he lived in County Roscommon from 1980 until 1982, was therefore not the complete break with his past life and work that it might have seemed. In the west too there was the decline of an old commuunity, only this time a decline that was taking place side by side with the rise of new values and a new culture. The photographs which he took in the west, and which are included in the book and exhibition of A Fair Day, powerfully document this co-existence of two different worlds in the same place.

Martin Parr's achievement in prooducing his startling vision of the West of Ireland is all the more extraordinary in view of the cloud of cliches which has long enveloped visual images of that part of the world. Tourist images of a wild landscape peopled by romanntic peasants have so saturated our consciousness that it might seem immpossible to break out of them. Martin Parr's decision to photograph the events which still distinguish the West of Ireland from the rest of the world èthe remaining fairs, the huge balllrooms, the open air religious cereemonies - might seem to have loaded the dice even further against any kind of clear vision: Each of the events has been a happy hunting ground for senntimental and picturesque distortions. But instead of sentiment he produced an almost intolerable sadness, in the place of the picturesque he put the absurd; he replaced patronising romannticism with a sharp but sympathetic humour. He has captured history on the run, change in the process of happening, literally before our eyes.

Since the economic expansion of the sixties, rural Ireland has gone from subsistence peasant farming to relative sophistication and affluence. Martin Parr takes us from a frugal couple stacking hay, looking like direct reppresentatives of de Valera's Ireland to an enormous white mansion called The High Chapparal which stands out against the Mayo landscape. It is hard to believe that all of these images date from the same three-year period, until you see other images where there is an extraordinary conglomeration of the two periods.

In one photograph the inscrutable rituals of horse trading, part of a much older world, take place outside the American kitsch front of the Nevada Burger Fast Food Restaurant on Westtport's Mill Street. In another the stark frame of a new bungalow almost obliiterates the looming bulk of Ben Bulben behind it. A Honda 50 is photoographed in front of a Celtic cross toppped with a black plastic flag commemoorating the dead hunger strikers. Boys comb their hair in front of a dancehall toilet mirror. And the landscape itself, for all its postcard allure, is littered with abandoned Morris Minors. Clashes and confusions like these are funny, but it is a humour underlain by a silent sadness. In one superb image, taken at a holy well, a statue of the Virgin Mary on one side of the photoograph is balanced on the other by the face of a baby in its mother's arms, the old confronting the new. On the bench between them sits a plastic cup, an unobtrusive reminder of the time and place. It is a photograph that manages to capture many of the funndamental human aspirations that reemain behind the frantic struggle for new images to clothe them with. It is a face of ourselves that we seldom see. A Fair Day is a chance to catch up on our own daily history.

A Fair Day: Photographs of the West of Ireland by Martin Parr with a text by Fintan O'Toole is published by Promenade Press and is available in bookshops. An exhibition of the same name is currently at the Orchard Gallery in Derry and opens at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin on July 26.