Martin Parr - Think Of England, 1999

Celebrated photographer Martin Parr travels around England during the summer of 1998, armed with a DV camera and a mission to define 'Englishness' through the nation's subjects.

Think of England (tx. 27/4/1999), shown as part of the BBC's Modern Times series, continues Martin Parr's project, documented over thirty years as a Magnum photographer, to expose the eccentricities and casual bigotry of England's white 'moral majority'. The film's rainswept resorts, dual-carriageway picnics, and village-of-the-damned fetes are unmistakably English, but Parr's surrealistic style (ugly close-ups of a bulging bicep with blurred "Liz" tattoo, or the naked lunch of a cardiac-inducing Sunday roast) is more reminiscent of American photographers Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, and film-maker David Lynch. For example, a day-glo red rose in Think of England, adrift in a concrete garden, echoes Blue Velvet's (US, d. Lynch, 1986) suburban nightmares, yet here the national symbol is transformed into a powerful metaphor for a falsely proud and isolated island.