The Martin Parr photo

Martin Parr, that celebrated photographer of ordinary life, died earlier this month. It’s fair to say that students of photojournalism and street photography will be well aware of his work, and not long since BBC Four showed a retrospective of his programmes made for the Beeb.

Many of Parr’s subjects tended to be in and around aspects of British culture that were, let’s say, once popular and no-one batted an eyelid about, but later forgotten and seen as niche, or a bit odd. His work brought a broader eye into those worlds, often with pinch of satire.

Several of his photographs were taken in Salford and Manchester during the 1970s and 80s. A retrospective of this work was displayed at Manchester Art Gallery along with a new commission entitled Return to Manchester in 2018.

Naturally, some of his projects brought elements of northern, working-class culture into focus, and rugby league was no exception. Of the photos Martin took at rugby league grounds, one was at The Willows.

I don’t have the details of the match, and the Web isn’t helping. I can’t even show the photo here because I know the Magnum photo agency want money for publishing it, and rapacious lawyers acting on their behalf will undoubtedly find out if I published it without remittance.

Essentially, it’s a black and white photo. There are seven men of varying ages stood relatively close together in the North Stand corner (Kennedy Road/New Cross Street side) all looking towards the pitch. My notes are that it was taken in 1979, which kind of works out time-wise as Marin Parr would notably switch to colour permanently around the early 1980s. I guess it’s winter given a few blokes are wearing sheepskin coats, but I couldn’t tell you which fixture.

Did this group of men know each other? Or were they an unassociated bunch huddling closer together for warmth, or for the social?

The interesting thing for me is when it was taken. The late 1970s and early 1980s is a period where a light was being shone at football hooliganism, and it being challenged as a solely working-class phenomenon.

In ‘Leeds, Lads and the Meeja’, an article in New Society (25 November 1982), Martyn Harris followed a group of Leeds United fans (lads, generally) to profile who they were and why they felt the need to kick-off most weekends. An experience of a rugby league match at Headingley is shown in juxtaposition, where the lads who may have fought with the clubs of rival fans on a Saturday, enjoyed a more leisurely pint on the rugby league terraces on a Sunday, where they’d be no mither from mounted police, and where loutish behaviour was more or less eschewed.

Though there is the feeling in that article that the rugby league terraces, the match experience, was a time capsule of a bygone era – a bit old school; a bit twee. And this is a criticism some level at Martin Parr’s work in that it as much took the piss out of dated traditions, working-class culture, or posh, village culture, as celebrate them.

Looking at Parr’s photo from the additional perspective of a Salford fan – and I’m sure this wasn’t his intention — it’s a marker of a time when Salford, and rugby league as a whole, was in transition. Brian Snape had rebuilt Salford RLFC in the 1960s and 1970s on the foundation of the Friday night experience – dining, casino, variety, and rugby league – and it was a model of diversified income streams that other clubs were encouraged to follow. However, by 1979, that approach was coming to an end, and in Salford’s case, the leisure and hospitality monies were running out.

Here, we have an image of seven men – no women, and crucially, no children. It was acknowledged that kids, who are the future after all, were kind of disregarded for a while, but needed to be refocused on to prevent a lost generation of supporters. It was only a matter of years after this photo was taken by Martin Parr that we saw the RFL pushing the mantra of the family game and the Salford club initiating the Junior Devils membership scheme, where children under 16 attended for free.

It’s an interesting image from an interesting time, culturally.