meish dot org: life, unfolding

Given that today is supposed to be the day that we all down tools and march up and down the high street in red and white, celebrating a turkish knight defeating a big lizard, I have been thinking about aspects of national identity, at least in part inspired by a couple of particularly resonant or pertinent (or both) bits of media.

At some point during the last year, I read Kate Fox’s interesting anthropological account of Englishness Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (reviews on the Amazon site vary from “very insightful” to “utter drivel – clearly, YMMV.) In her book, Fox turns the anthropological tables on her own nation, doing what ethnographers do best: looking for and recording patterns of behaviour, as a way to understand the norms and rules of a culture. I found myself reading it with a near-permanent nod on, recognising a lot of the details and scenarios she describes and dissects. It’s makes for a fascinating read for natives, aliens and incomers alike, and while it itself suffers from a bit of an identity crisis (is it an anthropological tract or a pop culture paperback?) it’s good commute fodder.

I switched on the TV tonight and sort of half-watched a More4 documentary called Looking for England, which took the format of asking a disparate bunch of individuals what they thought Englishness meant.

It wasn’t a patch on Martin Parr‘s excellent Think of England documentary from 1999, which combined the same questioning with Parr’s awesome eye for saturated, characteristically English visuals.

If anyone who works at the BBC reads this, I’d love to know how I could get hold of a copy. I taped it to video back in 1999, when it was first shown as part of the Modern Times series, but think it may have got lost in subsequent moves (and no longer have anything to play it on, besides).

Some accompanying photographs were transformed into an exhibition and then a book of the same name, which I’d also love to get hold of at some point.

England has been a key subject of Magnum photographer Martin Parr’s work since he started taking pictures. Think of England is a comic, opinionated, affectionately satirical, colour-saturated photo-essay about the identity of England. As Scotland and Wales consolidate their status as nations and Great Britain begins to unravel, this book of new work contributes to the debate about what it means to be English.

Quintessentially English himself, Martin Parr’s great achievement as a photographer is his ability to transform the obvious into the surprising, reinventing clichés of Englishness as provocative revelations. His tour of obvious England takes in Ascot and the charity shop, seaside resorts, herbaceous borders, the bring-and-buy stall, cucumber sandwiches and cups of tea, baked beans and bad footwear. Parr’s work has already added to the visual vocabulary of England; this book, his first specifically on the subject of England, stretches it further.

Simultaneously affectionate and brutally direct, all the photographs are shot with a ring flash camera (normally used for medical photographs), which has been his medium of choice for the last four years. (from the Phaidon Press site)

It did strike me that it’s the kind of documentary which might have made it online, but the closest I could find was this, a short film compiled of imagery from Martin Parr’s earlier documentaries, covering the wider theme of the UK. But still, strangely compelling.

If you’re interested in seeing more of Parr’s work, there’s a decent sized gallery on his Magnum Photographers site, or for the near-real-deal, check out this flickr thread of shots which approach his style, taken by Flickr users and selected by lomokev.