Match Point: Tennis

The book is a bright, compact thing, the kind of object Martin Parr has spent a lifetime making feel disposable and permanent at once. Phaidon has given it a cover loud enough to sit on a coffee table like a punchline and a page size that suits the flat, frontal color inside. It looks, deliberately, a little like a souvenir program, which is the correct disguise for what it actually is: another chapter in one photographer's decades-long anthropology of how people at leisure give themselves away.

What does a tennis match look like if you turn your back on the tennis? Parr never points the camera where the broadcast does. The players are mostly absent or incidental; the real match is in the stands, at the bar, on the sunburnt necks and the wilting hats, in the ranked deckchairs and the very British business of queuing for strawberries. Shot at Wimbledon and at scruffier clubs and courts around the world, the pictures treat the sport as a pretext for the social spectacle it organizes.

The method is unmistakable. Saturated color from a ring flash even in daylight, so a pink drink or a Union Jack visor detonates off the page. A framing that crops for the absurd detail: the exact geometry of a sunhat, the sweat, the sponsorship, the boredom of a child dragged to center court. He watches class the way other photographers watch light, reading it in shoes and coolers and the specific way people perform belonging at an event that is quietly about who is let in.

Look at how he handles the strawberries and cream. The little plastic tub, the too-red fruit, the flimsy fork, the price that is part of the ritual: he photographs the Wimbledon snack with the same forensic sweetness he once brought to an entire book about food, and the joke and the tenderness arrive together. Nobody in the frame thinks they are being observed. Everybody is revealing exactly who they are.

There is a working lesson buried in the comedy. The action everyone came to see is the least photographable thing in the room, and the truth of an event usually leaks out at its edges, in the waiting and the eating and the small failures of dignity. This is the whole career in miniature, the same instinct that runs through Only Human and Real Food: aim at the crowd, not the spectacle, and the crowd will tell you what the spectacle was for.

And the color does real work. Parr's palette is often mistaken for mere garishness, but the loud saturation is a moral position, refusing to flatter, insisting on the plastic and the polyester and the sunburn exactly as they are. Carried from Wimbledon's manicured lawns to dusty public courts elsewhere, the same unsparing brightness levels everyone. The duchess in the members' enclosure and the kid on a cracked municipal court get the identical honest, unkind, affectionate light.

The comedy never tips into cruelty, which is the hardest line to hold in this kind of work. He is laughing with the ritual, not down at the people caught inside it, and the difference shows in the affection that survives even the most unflattering frame. A sunburnt spectator asleep with a program over his face is absurd and also, somehow, tenderly human, the kind of small collapse everyone commits and nobody usually photographs. You are rarely allowed to feel superior for long.

None of this is his most ambitious statement. Set beside the sharper social sting of his earlier work, Match Point is a lighter outing, a virtuoso playing a familiar tune on a single subject. The satire is affectionate to the point of comfort, and a viewer new to the work would do better to begin with the bigger surveys. What the collection offers is concentration: one master eye, one strange ritual, and nothing to distract from the looking.

Picture your next big event, the wedding, the gala, the tournament, and the moment the thing everyone is watching finally happens. Then turn around. The uncle asleep in a folding chair, the caterer stealing a cigarette, the flower girl mid-meltdown by the gift table: that is where Parr would be standing, and more often than not, that is where the real photograph waits.