Martin Parr was a joy to work with. He also helped me to understand the dangerous moment we’re living through

Moscow, 2008: I was on an assignment to report on the “New Russians”, the emerging oligarch class and the culture they’d created, and found myself in something called the “Millionaire Fair”. Held inside a vast trade hall, it featured stands displaying the most absurd products known to capitalism. A diamond-studded computer zip card lingers in the memory, as do the coffee tables made out of the tusks of woolly mammoths dug out of the Siberian permafrost. 

But there, in the gloaming, amid the six-foot models on giraffe legs and thick-set security men guarding their even thicker-set clients, was a lanky bespectacled Englishman in a multi-pocketed khaki jacket with a camera around his neck.

It turned out to be Martin Parr, the celebrated Magnum photographer who died last week. I ended up hanging out with Martin in Moscow and, having discovered we had a taste for similar sorts of stories, we cooked up a plan to go to Beijing together (commissioned by Jane Ferguson, one of my Nerve co-founders: thank you, Jane!)

Martin was working on the series that would become his book Luxury, and he was fervently pursuing the sights of this new globalised elite at play. He’d become known for his hyper-realist photographs of the British working classes, on holiday, eating ice-cream, but he’d correctly deduced that something socially and culturally significant was happening and he wanted to document it. 

I’d pitched the Beijing story to be about a brand-new emergent middle class and its fascination with the ultimate objects of desire: cars. And Martin was indefatigable – he wanted to see and photograph it all, the weirder and more wonderful the better. At one point we went to another trade show, and Martin was cock-a-hoop when he discovered the “Roewe” stand and excitedly came to fetch me to show off his findings. 

The car was a re-badged Rover, the British marque that had been sold off to a Chinese auto manufacturer. It had dressed the salesmen as James Bonds, a cultural collision that Martin lapped up. 

For years, he said, documentary social photography had focused on poverty. “Whereas I think the new frontline is luxury.”

A year later, I reviewed his exhibition Parrworld and wrote: “I could see his point although I wasn’t wholly convinced. Now, though, after everything that's happened – the collapse of the world’s banking system and an interrogation of the value system that produced it – he's been proved right. Luxury is the new poverty. Or, at least, it’s a concept whose time has come to be scrutinised and evaluated and his project seems almost spookily prescient.”

It’s 17 years since I met Martin at the Millionaire Fair and everything has changed again. As Philip Oltermann wrote in the Guardian this week: “If Parr in Britain is remembered as a satirical chronicler of English traditions, his status in countries such as France and Japan has come to be that of a political artist monitoring modernity.” 

That’s how I felt about hanging out with Martin. That I got to see these sights through the eyes of a political artist. A political artist who, though deadly serious about his work, was without pretension. He was a great photographer but he was also a great travel companion: funny, observant, endlessly curious. (Also: a terrific shopper. As an avid collector, he’d tracked down a tiny shop selling original Cultural Revolution artefacts: I have a poster of a happy smiling communist girl on my wall to this day, thanks to Martin.) 

He’s always been treated with more seriousness in Europe and his death was no exception, splashed across the front page of Le Monde and the national bulletins. 

I didn’t know what I was seeing in those years, what it meant, where it would lead us, but Martin’s artist’s eye made me look harder: not just his photographs, but how he curated them alongside the treasures that he collected on his travels (or on eBay, another of his obsessions) – his attempt to understand the moment we were living through. 

My pieces from the mid-2000s don’t stand out: they were throwaway Sunday morning reading from the days when newspapers had travel budgets and I thought journalism was mostly entertainment, though it’s had a longer tail. The trips to Moscow and elsewhere are part of the weft and weave of all the journalism I’ve done since 2016, and what I’m still trying to do here, at the Nerve. 

That world of freewheeling Russian oligarchs and a corrupt and authoritarian regime has now bled into ours, with all its destabilising consequences. We are living in the shadow of the globalisation that Martin so meticulously documented and helped us see. 

It’s also why, at the Nerve, we decided on a “culture first” strategy. There is so much happening today that’s beyond our ability to comprehend: we need different ways of seeing reality. That’s what artists do and that’s what Martin gave to me. 

I’ve thought about that Millionaire Fair more than you’d imagine in the intervening 17 years. It was held in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, owned by Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani billionaire, and five years later, it would host Donald Trump and the Miss Universe contest. That became a foundational event in the Trump-Russia investigation: a story that, day by day, we see playing out in real time. 

Last year, Crocus City Hall became the site of a mass atrocity: 149 people were killed in a terrorist attack. It burned to the ground and may or may not be rebuilt, a metaphor I’ll choose not to dwell on. 

RIP Martin, and thanks for the memories.