A prize potato and a horse-headed scarecrow: Martin Parr's final photos are pure genius

There's a photograph in Martin Parr's final commission that's almost unbearably him. A single potato, lumpy and unremarkable, sits on a decorative paper plate beneath a pink card reading "FIRST PRIZE". The exhibitor's name: Anthony Edwards. The event: the Lacock Garden and Allotment Association Annual Flower Show. The photographer: the man who, for half a century, understood better than anyone that this – all of this – is what Britain actually looks like.

The National Trust opens Lacock by Martin Parr at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire on 27 June, running for a full year. It's his last major commission, developed with Magnum Photos and the Martin Parr Foundation, and it has a significance that goes well beyond the work itself: Parr, who died in December aged 73, shot it at the birthplace of photography.

Closing the circle

Lacock Abbey was home to William Henry Fox Talbot, the pioneer who invented the photographic negative in the 1830s. That Parr's final body of work was made here, in the very place where the medium he devoted his life to was born, is the kind of symmetry even he might have found a little on the nose.

He had history with the village. In the 1980s, Parr photographed Lacock as part of the process that led to his breakthrough style, before The Last Resort made him famous. Returning in 2025, with his health failing, he did what he always did. Turned up, started paying attention and found something fascinating.

The results include a horse-headed scarecrow slumped in a folding chair beside a wet road, a man in full Union Jack regalia running a "Pick a Lolly" stall at a VE Day celebration, and that glorious prize-winning potato. In other words: classic Parr, every frame of it.

What these images actually are

It's tempting to look at pictures like these and assume they're easy to take. They're not. The scarecrow photograph in particular is a study in restraint: the figure is positioned just off-centre, the wet road recedes into the trees, the whole thing reads as slightly mournful and very funny simultaneously. That balance, between affection and absurdity, requires both patience and an extremely particular way of seeing.

The flower show image, meanwhile, works for different reasons. The prize card does most of the heavy lifting, and Parr knows it. He frames the potato and card together so they form a single composition, the vegetable's imperfections rhyming with the slightly smudged handwriting of the exhibitor's name. It's a two-element photograph that says everything it needs to.

For readers of this website, the lesson may be familiar, but it's worth repeating. Parr didn't need exotic locations, extreme weather or unusual access. He needed a village fete, a scarecrow trail and a VE Day street party; events happening all over Britain every summer. The difference was simply that he went, and looked properly.

Why this exhibition matters

Curator Dr Andy Cochrane describes the project as Parr's "gift to us all", which is the right way to frame it. Susie Parr, his widow, writes in the accompanying book that looking through these images is "bittersweet", noting that her husband made them "when his health was failing so dramatically". That context inevitably colors how you see them, yet the work itself is free of sentimentality. The potato doesn't care. The scarecrow is still funny.

The exhibition runs alongside a short film about the project and an accompanying book with a foreword by Susie Parr. Both are worth your attention. Parr always said he made serious photographs disguised as entertainment. These final images prove he was still doing it right up until the end, at the place where it all began.

Lacock by Martin Parr opens at the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, UK, on June 27 2026 and runs until June 27 2027. Visit nationaltrust.org.uk/lacock for further information.

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