Martin Parr took this picture on New Year’s Eve, 1992, in the village of Chew Stoke in Somerset – a few months after another Conservative election victory.
It was the last act of a year-long project in which Parr documented village life – cricket matches, summer weddings and “little tensions between commuters and more traditional ways of life”. Much of that observation inevitably centred on the pub. “The landlord was quite crazy,” Parr recalls, “and he is being set upon here by a member of the Chew Stoke women’s rugby team, who also tended to be quite boisterous.” The photographer had got to know the people well enough by then for them almost to forget his camera was there.
Even so, capturing the confined chaos of the very English bacchanal, was hit and miss. “When you take photographs on these kinds of occasions,” Parr says, “it is very difficult to distil everything into a single picture. Sometimes you think you have got it, and then you look at the picture the next day and realise you missed the atmosphere. You’re looking for the moment where it all comes to a head.”
All photos change with time, but he suspects something like this scene will be replicated again this New Year’s Eve “when everything tends to become more itself”. He lives not far away in Bristol and drives through Chew Stoke from time to time. “I opened the agricultural show one year,” he says. “The pub is still going strong, the shop keeps changing hands,” but mostly it is what it was. The village represents one strand of Parr’s principal life’s work, which is to capture a sense of Englishness. “It’s my number one subject,” he says, “and in our divided country, the search continues.”
