Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 13 Mar 2020

Looking at The Non-Conformists by Martin & Susie Parr

The Magnum photographer Martin Parr is famous for his highly-saturated, ring-flash close-ups of garish and grotesque beach scenes and social occasions from across the class divide, a style that brings together the methods of photojournalism, conceptual and art photography, advertising and commercial photography.

When Parr was first admitted to Magnum, the co-operative of the world’s élite photojournalists, some felt his style was innovative and pushed photojournalism in a new direction that reflected the tenor of those Thatcherite times; others felt it flew in the face of the ‘humane photo-documentary’ tradition that Magnum generally regarded as its raison d’être. The aristocratic purist of black-and-white photography and the ‘decisive moment’, Henri Cartier-Bresson, in outrage said Parr was a fascist and an exploiter. Cartier-Bresson subsequently apologised but the row shook Magnum to its foundations, going down in history as one of the bitterest disputes ever to embroil this notoriously disputatious collective of photographers. (The episode is recounted in Russell Miller’s indispensable ‘biography’ of Magnum, Magnum: Fifty Years at the Frontline of History.)

Of course, Parr has since gone on to gain a worldwide reputation that encompasses photography, journalism, curation and publishing. He is a renowned authority on the history and development of the photobook and has published expert critical monographs on the subject. His personal collection of some 12,000 photobooks – some fabulously rare – is worth a fortune and has just been acquired by the Tate.

But back in the mid-1970s Parr was a newly qualified art school graduate struggling to get established in the capital’s cut-throat world of professional photography. In desperation – or perhaps, with an inspiration born of desperation – he moved to Hebden Bridge with the plan of documenting the rapidly declining mill towns of the Calder Valley. Here, in these austere moorland towns and villages, communities that were largely unchanged since the late-nineteenth century were shrinking fast as the textile industry collapsed, farmers left the land and small family-owned businesses – some of them almost impossibly antiquated – lost their customers and began to close.

But what the area did have was lots of cheap ex-industrial properties and in the 70s these began to be taken over – sometimes legally, sometimes squatted – by artists and writers, hippies, activists and bohemians fleeing the suffocating working class respectability of the suburbs of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, or the slum landlordism and rising cost of living of London.

Over the next five years Parr photographed obsessively, documenting the moors and chapels, the working lives and the social events and daily goings-on of these Calder Valley communities. Susie, the woman who would become his wife, wrote elegantly precise texts to accompany the pictures, and it is this joint effort which makes up The Non-Conformists, the 2013 book which sees this particular aspect of Parr’s early work published in book form for the very first time.

And what a delightful book it is. Gentle, wistful and nostalgic but also respectful, unillusioned and quietly analytical, this is black-and-white documentary photography of the most classic kind and you constantly have to remind yourself that the world you are witnessing the disappearance of is not pre-First World War or perhaps the inter-war years, but just forty-five years ago. The tiny damp non-conformist chapels buffeted by the moor-top winds are still – just about – the centre of daily community life. The tiny piece-work colliery, Cliviger’s, employs four men underground, its operation essentially pre-industrial. The Hebden Bridge Picture House, once grandly built to seat a thousand people, its foyer and corridors still gas-lit, struggles on, a labour of love sustained by blood and sweat and newly popular bingo sessions. The Lydgate pop works is as unchanged as a Victorian soda factory that Dickens might have described. And at the annual grouse shoot on Lord Savile’s Hebden Bridge estate one is surprised to see shotguns in use and not flintlocks. It is an utterly lost and deeply affecting world.

I don’t normally write here about photography books because they are such difficult things to review and seem to require a completely different discipline. But having finally bought a copy of The Non-Conformists I felt compelled to give it some kind of coverage because books of this kind don’t come along in great numbers. This is a fully-formed body of work captured at the very beginnings of a now world-famous photographer’s career. It documents a time and place that is both profoundly familiar and shockingly distant. And in capturing a period of English social history it does a double service because it also records something of the development of British documentary photography – in itself a neglected history, its practitioners, now I come to think of it, as resilient, as austere and as fiercely independent as the Non-Conformist chapel communities depicted here.

You can see virtually all of the pictures contained in The Non-Conformists here on the Magnum website (an absolute treasure trove of some of the world’s greatest photojournalism, by the way), but if you can, treat yourself to the book. It is elegantly produced and designed and flawlessly printed. The plates have a soft luminosity that entirely suits the subject matter. Moreover, it is that rare hybrid – a proper photography book that can also be read as social history, its text brief, well-written and entirely free of academic or sociological jargon. Used and new copies can be found from about £18 or £20 or so.

 

Alun Severn

March 2020