“I don’t understand why it’s sometimes said that my pictures are controversial,” says the British documentary photographer Martin Parr. “Basically, all photography lies to us in some way, and always has, so I’m just doing it in a different way in aiming to show the reality, the way it is, and that makes people uncomfortable perhaps. You go to a war zone or famine, it’s not considered controversial, but shooting people in a supermarket somehow is.”

Even Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of Parr’s heroes, once expressed his disdain for his direct, unsentimental approach. “He got very angry about [my photos] and wrote to me this fax to say ‘I don’t know who you are but you look to me to have come from a different planet,’” Parr says. “But the fact is that he photographed things from the past, and I photograph things as they are now—and society has changed.”

Besides, he adds, it’s not as if the accusations of snobbery that his characteristically full-colour, fly-on-the-wall shots of people at social events—from a day at the beach to a church fete—have done him any harm. He was recently inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and is the subject of a forthcoming documentary, I Am Martin Parr. Global brands, Paul Smith and Gucci among them, have sought him out to shoot fashion campaigns, which he likes for the money—it funds his important archive of British photography in Bristol, western England—but admits finding amusing.

“People want me to take ‘Martin Parr’ pictures, which is good, because that’s all I can take,” he says. “But actually, I think they’re slightly subversive of fashion though [the people who hire me] don’t seem to have spotted that. I’m getting away with it.”

But Parr, now 72, does at least concede that his pictures are critiques—he has what he calls a love/hate relationship with his native U.K.—and as he puts it, political in an absurd way. They can touch a nerve, he argues, by providing “laughter and discomfort at the same time because [they show] what the world is like. I think I’m basically reflecting the absurdity and the weirdness of the world we all live in. Not everyone spots that on a daily basis, so I’m trying to draw that out on their behalf. Ordinary life is pretty surreal when you think about it.”

Take, for example, some people’s strange enthusiasm for taking photos of themselves, which he documented in one of his most entertaining books, Death by Selfie (2019). Indeed, while Parr says that he can still move around with seeming invisibility—“I’m pretty anonymous and tend to blend into the background in my typical middle-class casualwear,” he says. “My work is a lot of loitering with intent, but weirdly, a lot of people just don’t notice you, despite standing there maybe with a big telephoto lens”—it’s the smartphone in every pocket that, he argues, has been the most transformational tech of his 50 years in photography.

“That has had a huge impact on our society,” Parr says. “Not just the selfies but the way people go places and the first thing they do is photograph it. Or walking down a street just looking at their phone. In a way, they’re being divorced from reality by the smartphone. We have Instagram too, but the problem is that more than most of the photos on that are rubbish.

“You have to work hard at photography, and people still tend to think it’s an easy shortcut because it’s so simple to point your camera and shoot,” he says. “But it’s what you point it at and what you’re trying to say that counts.”

I Am Martin Parr will be released later this year.

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