Sports Calendar

In Small World, published in 1995, Parr tackled mass international tourism, the subject that has most preoccupied him ever since. He has travelled all over the world, even to North Korea, and no longer takes holidays as such. “I just go on work trips with my camera and, sometimes, my wife.” His mission is, again, to combat propaganda. “Tourism is the biggest industry in the world. You can’t ignore it. I like to explore the problem with it, which is the difference between the myth and the reality of the place. The purpose of most travel photography is to sell travel adverts, which doesn’t interest me at all.”

Selling his own work, however, interests him a great deal. The success of his 40-odd books and countless exhibitions has made him, by his own admission, “very wealthy”. As well as the house in Bristol, he owns another in Padstow and two flats in London, one of which serves as his office. This is another reason why, according to his supporters, he is so deeply resented by British photographers. “It’s very hard to make a good living in this country doing what Martin does,” says Griffin. “There’s a lot of envy out there.”

Parr remains characteristically unfazed. “I am very promiscuous. I do anything and everything. I like the fact that photography is high and low culture all in one. You can take an advertising shot and sell it as art, and vice versa. Part of my agenda as a photographer is to exploit my work in every possible way. Documentary, fashion, art are all so interconnected now, you can hardly tell them apart.”

He describes himself as “a workaholic”, and you can see what he means when you visit his London office, a duplex apartment in Clerkenwell. As unprepossessing from the outside as its owner, on the inside the place is an Aladdin’s cave, the walls of the main living area lined to a height of 20ft with boxes of prints. There is a large temperature-controlled closet that acts as a library, containing around 100,000 negatives. On the mezzanine level, dwarfed by shelves of photography books and miscellaneous clutter, is the bed where he sleeps on his weekly trips to London. As an image of how his life is almost crowded out by his work, that bed is hard to beat. Someone should take a picture of it.

Parr probably doesn’t have the time. Soon he flies to Dubai for a race meeting, part of an ongoing project, Luxury. “The new rich of the world, I think of as the new front line,” he says. “Major sports events are a perfect time to catch people aspirationally showing off their new-found wealth. Whether they’ve got it or not.” After Dubai he has trips planned to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Melbourne Cup, and a car show in Beijing. Then he’s back for the Frieze Art Fair in London, which he hopes will furnish him with more unsuspecting quarry for Luxury.

The irony that Parr will himself make a lot of money photographing these rich types flashing their affluence is not lost on this hardened provocateur: “I build hypocrisy into my thinking. I’m saying, ‘We’re all guilty.’ And I think that’s quite funny, really.”

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