Can Martin Parr work his magic on the Brighton Photo Biennial? | Sean O'Hagan
The Brighton Photo Biennial, now in its fourth edition, has not impacted on the public imagination the way certain literary and art festivals have. This may have something to do with how British attitudes to photography remain, in the main, conservative, and with the lack of funding. No doubt the two are linked.
If anyone can rebrand the Brighton Photo Biennial as a serious contender, though, Martin Parr can. Back in 2004, he was invited by the organisers of the annual Rencontres D'Arles to be guest curator. That year's Arles festival, in its range and ambition, remains the standard by which all subsequent Rencontres have been judged. Back then, Parr indulged his love for vernacular and found photography, and his passion for new, often eccentric, talent as well as great photographers he felt had been overlooked. He included Tony Ray-Jones and Chris Killip, two masters of British photojournalism, in the rediscovery section alongside an exhibition of Henryk Ross's extraordinary visual testimony of suffering and survival, the Lodz Ghetto Archive. In the contemporary section, he showed the work of groundbreaking younger photographers like Rinko Kawauchi, Katy Grannan and Stephen Gill, all of whom have since gone on to greater things.
The events at Arles, too, were illuminating and provocative, with Erik Kessels, editor of the magazine Useful Photography, railing brilliantly and very funnily against the spread of art photography, and Parr continually insisting on the importance of photography as an art form – something the French, unlike the British, seem to have no problem with. (Parr, incidentally, is revered in France for his quintessential Englishness; his big show, Parrworld, was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris last year and attracted record crowds.)
Brighton, however, is not Arles, and given that the Biennial is run on a fraction of the budget of the French festival it is unfair to compare them. (This year, Brighton has styled itself as the world's first "frameless" festival, with work pinned and pasted to the walls – a case of turning one's limitations into a badge of honour.) Yet Parr has once again had fun as a curator. "When I was putting it together, I didn't have a theme," he admits in this month's Photoworks, the official partner magazine to the festival. "I just wanted to show the best work I discovered in recent years."
Parr has provocatively titled the festival New Documents, a nod to John Szarkowski's seminal show of the same name at Moma, New York in 1967 that featured the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. I think this is slightly misleading, as a lot of the work in the Brighton Biennial might be better termed "conceptual documentary" – work which is reacting against the documentary tradition. (In a discussion I took part in for the current issue of Photoworks, Paul Reas, a photographer who teaches conceptual documentary at Newport, defined conceptual documentary as "photography that is primarily about ideas … the idea is very self-consciously present, and the research behind the idea is forefronted in the work".)
Parr has once again chosen to exhibit the work of two of his favourite younger photographers: Japan's Rinko Kawauchi and Londoner Stephen Gill, both of whom, alongside the American photographer Alec Soth, have made work about Brighton. I, for one, cannot be the only one disappointed that we are not seeing retrospectives of all three alongside this new work, given that both Kawauchi and Soth, though internationally lauded, have barely had their work exhibited in this country. Parr's defence, though, is a good one. "One of the problems with festivals – and I go to a lot – is that half the time I'm seeing people that I've seen before. One of the things I wanted to do was ensure that even the well-informed will make some discoveries."
Soth will not actually be showing his work but that of his seven-year-old daughter. Though this is due to his trouble with customs for not having a work visa, it seems like a lame conceptual joke and not the sort of thing that would have me dashing to Brighton to check out the show. Elsewhere, though, things look promising. Over the opening weekend (1 – 3 October), the public have the chance to, as Parr puts it, "meet BPB 2010 visiting artists, discuss and debate the latest issues in contemporary photography and browse new books at the publishers hub."
From the series Brighton Picture Hunt by Carmen Soth, seven-year-old daughter of Alec. Photograph courtesy Carmen & Alec Soth
The themed exhibitions include Queer Brighton, new work by Molly Landreth and Zoe Strauss documenting the lives of the town's gay, bisexual and transgender communities, and the wonderful installation The House of Vernacular, which includes seven different collections of commercial and amateur photography from around the globe. (Check out Aeroplane Interiors, a show of obscenely luxurious private jets that belonged to African dictators in the 1960s and 70s.)
Parr has also curated a show by two Argentinian photographers, Alejandro Chaskielberg and Esteban Pastorino Diaz, both of whom shoot at night and produce luminous, unreal images of landscapes and people.
"A lot of that work is looking at the world in different ways and therefore you can call it documentary," says Parr in the Photoworks discussion, "but it's image-led – the theory comes after. Many festivals are very theory and genre-led. This festival is entirely wide open." We should expect nothing else from a photographer who has become the most important catalyst for, and curator of, new and overlooked photography. This year's Brighton Photo Biennial may yet become the model for the great British photo festival of the future. If not, it will not be for want of trying on Parr's part.
Now see this
The Third Man: A retrospective of the Work of Brian Duffy is on at The Lucy Bell Gallery in St-Leonards-on-Sea until 19 November. Alongside Terence Donovan and David Bailey, Duffy changed the face of fashion photography in the 60s. He was arguably the most temperamental of the so-called "Terrible Three", and famously set fire to his negatives when he retired in the 80s. His son, Chris, has restored the archive and many images are on display here for the first time.