Almost 50 years after he was nearly kicked out of Manchester’s polytechnic for failing his photo theory course, the documentary photographer Martin Parr has trained his lens on the city once more.
In Return to Manchester, a major commission for Manchester Art Gallery, Parr creates a portrait of a rapidly changing urban landscape which this year had more cranes on the skyline than any other European city, according to the council’s chief executive.
This time, Parr looks at bourgeoise Manchester as well as his more familiar working classes: a shopper in the Unicorn, an organic cooperative supermarket, wearing a “this is what a vegan looks like” hoodie; scientists in hazmat suits at the University of Manchester’s Graphene Institute; brogue-wearing BBC executives having a pow-wow in a tunnel-like pod that replaces conventional meeting rooms at Salford’s MediaCity.
Parr was tickled by the pods. “The BBC must have been so excited about the pods when they moved in, but now they are starting to look a bit dated and I was very attracted to that,” he said, as he showed journalists around the exhibition on Thursday.
Another photograph was described as “my tribute to [spoof BBC show] W1A”, featuring a Beeb worker taking a phonecall on an uncomfortable-looking sofa with a Brompton folding bike in the background.
He spent about 20 days in Manchester from April to July this year, taking an estimated 10,000 photographs. Often he worked on the street, including at the annual Pride festival, or by a urinal set up on match days in a street near Old Trafford. Other times he was invited into people’s workplaces or homes, such as a royal wedding house party in Didsbury, one of the city’s most expensive suburbs.
Parr said he “couldn’t quite believe the acceleration of gentrification” of Manchester since his last working visit 10 years ago, when the Guardian commissioned him to take photographs of the city for a special supplement.
“I like the new Manchester but you do feel there is a divide between the older Manchester and the newer Manchester,” he said. “If you’re in the centre it is gentrified, no question about that. But if you go into the suburbs that’s where you see the older, more traditional aspects of north-west life are still alive and well. There’s no gentrification at Bury market. I like both.”
The show also exhibits Parr’s earliest work in Greater Manchester, including a joint project with Daniel Meadows, where the pair decamped to the original inspiration for Coronation Street in 1972. Salford’s June Street, like so much of the locations from Parr’s past work in the region, has now been demolished, precluding a return trip.
But Parr is unsentimental about the past. “My job as a photographer is to represent the places where we live and the times we live in,” he said. “So I’m as much thinking about the years to come and how these photographs are going to represent a particular place and time. I’ve as much got an eye on the future as the current time.”
Martin Parr: Return to Manchester is at Manchester Art Gallery from 16 November to 22 April 2019.
