Only Human: Photographs by Martin Parr

Point a hard flash at a nation and it flinches, and the flinch is the portrait. Martin Parr has built a career proving that the least flattering light is also the most honest one, and Only Human is his fullest case for the idea, a portrait of Britain made in the very years it could least agree on what Britain was.

The pictures gather from the run-up to and the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, a country caught mid-argument with itself. Parr photographs it the way he always has, up close, over-lit, saturated past the point of comfort, at dog shows and tennis clubs and establishment garden parties and immigration-service queues. The subject is Britishness, and the method refuses to let anyone off the hook.

The signature look does specific work here. Direct flash flattens skin, blows out a champagne flute, turns a paper plate of food into a still life nobody requested, and levels every surface to the same democratic glare. A duchess and a steward photographed this way become, disconcertingly, the same species.

That leveling is the whole moral argument. Fame, class, and self-regard all dissolve under one bulb, and what remains is bodies at their small rituals, eating, queuing, waiting to be noticed. The title is not ironic; the pictures really are only human, and that is at once the joke and the mercy.

It arrived alongside his 2019 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and the gallery framing matters more than it first appears. Portraiture is the tradition being quietly vandalized here, the hushed wall of noble faces answered with a wall of chip-eating ordinary ones. The institution let him hang the anti-portrait inside the portrait's own house.

The venues read like an anatomy of the national character: ballroom-dancing finals, county shows, the members' enclosure, a chain pub at midday, the beach at low tide. Parr trains identical curiosity on a horse-race hat and a hi-vis vest. The costume changes; the appetite underneath it does not.

The comedy lives in the specifics. A fascinator competing with the bloom behind it, a man asleep in a deckchair with his mouth open to the sun, the precise social choreography of a queue that refuses to admit it is a queue. He notices the things a polite photographer would look away from, and he refuses to look away.

Color carries an argument of its own. British light is famously grey, and answering it with this much artificial saturation is nearly a provocation, a refusal to let the national palette stay tasteful and damp. The chips are too orange, the deckchairs too blue, the whole island turned up well past what the actual weather would ever permit. The excess is not decoration; it is the point of view.

Food keeps recurring, as it always does in his work, the same lurid close-ups that fill Real Food surfacing here as social evidence. What a person eats, and how, and where, becomes a class map more precise than any survey could draw. A cream tea and a foil tray of chips are two dialects of one sentence.

Then come the autoportraits, the seam of self-mockery that keeps the whole enterprise from turning cruel. He has himself photographed in commercial studios around the world, kitsch backdrops and space suits and airbrushed glamour, feeding his own face into the same absurd machinery he trains on everyone else. It is the ethical hinge of the project; he never once stands outside the joke.

The sequencing lets comedy and unease share a spread without resolving either. A grinning close-up gives way to something quietly desolate, and the edit never tells you which reading is meant to win. Refusing to settle that is far more sophisticated than the loud surfaces let on.

The standing charge against Parr is that he condescends, that the flash mocks the people it catches mid-bite. It is a fair worry, and a few frames here do flirt with it. What rescues them is the total absence of an exemption; the camera is crueler to power, and to the photographer himself, than to any pensioner at a seaside café.

Read now, the timing hands the collection a documentary weight it may not have planned for. This is what the country looked like at a hinge in its own story, class and leisure and food and flag all photographed with the same bright suspicion. Few bodies of work have caught a national mood this precisely while pretending to do nothing but enjoy the buffet.

The result is very funny. It is also, by the final pages, unexpectedly moving.

There is a technical master class running underneath the social one. It shows how a single lighting decision hardens into a worldview, how flash becomes an argument, how proximity and color do the editorializing so the captions never have to. Learn to hear what the light is saying and you cannot unhear it, and every choice here, the flash, the crop, the color, insists that ordinary life is worth exactly this much scrutiny.

Come to this one after Fashion Faux Parr and the courts of Match Point, where the same eye works a narrower field, and the scale of the ambition here snaps into focus. Better yet, carry it to your next shoot. Set the fill a stop too bright, step in closer than feels polite, and watch how fast a flattering portrait turns into a true one.