Snap happy

For Martin Parr, seeing his pictures in a major exhibition at the Tate Modern is more than just a personal triumph. It's a victory for photography as a whole. Sitting in the fourth-floor cafe while his prints are being hung in the gallery next door, he recalls a famous incident in the Eighties, when

But times have changed, and photography is slowly becoming an accepted part of the art world. In 2000 the Turner Prize went to a photographer - Wolfgang Tillmans - for the first time, and now the Tate is staging its first major photography exhibition, Cruel And Tender, a show Parr describes as 'a potted history of straight photography from the 20th century'.

For those used to seeing Parr's photographs in magazines and books, the huge prints in the Tate will come as a surprise. They resemble advertising hoardings in size and colour, but what Parr aims to show is the gap between consumerist dreams and their mundane reality. 'I'm using the language of advertising, commercial work - things of which I'm part but at the same time try to question. I'm using bright colours, which are normally associated with upbeat subjects, in quite an ironic way.'

He tends to focus on the artificial, the ugly, the alienated. He will always see the wasp on the jam, the lipstick on the teeth, the debris on the beach. There's a shot in the exhibition that illustrates his style perfectly. Beautifully composed, it shows a large woman in a tight, tacky, floral top about to tuck in to some monstrous confection of spray-can cream and watery-looking chocolate. Since her head isn't visible, you focus on the details: the garish rings on her fat fingers, the ugly dark bruise on her arm, and of course the 'I love bingo' watch. Your first response is to smile, but the more you look, the sadder the picture becomes: a heart attack in the making, a portrait of a woman slowly but inexorably committing suicide.

Born in 1952, Parr grew up in Surrey. His grandfather was a keen amateur photographer who passed on a love of the medium to young Martin. His father was a bird-watcher who often took his son on twitcher trips to Hersham sewage farm, and Martin inherited his obsessiveness and fastidiousness. A former train spotter, he is still an avid collector, of images of the world first and foremost, but also postcards (some of which have been compiled into the strangely compelling Boring Postcards books), photography books (he's writing a history of the genre), magazines, Spice Girls merchandise and other ephemera.

He studied photography at Manchester Poly, working as a staff photographer at Butlins in Filey to earn money in the holidays. His early black-and-white photographs documented working-class communities in the North of England, but it wasn't until Thatcherism began decimating those communities that he really found his vision. In 1982 he began shooting in colour, using ring-flash to photograph the decaying Merseyside seaside town of New Brighton, suburban pretentions, middle-class greed, junk food and the effects of mass tourism in garish, saturated colour. I've never been sure whether he loves or loathes his subjects, and he says it's often both. 'If I look at my relationship towards England, for example, I both love it and hate it at the same time. I can't express it in words as well as I can express it in pictures. It's always based on a contradiction, on a juxtaposition, on an ambiguity.'

What he looks for in his pictures is the telling detail, 'a moment where something of the vulnerability of life reveals itself'. But there's also a lot of humour in his work. He often goes to the Edinburgh Festival for the comedy, he says, because it is always revealing. 'A good stand-up comedian talks about his own life, about society and about all our vulnerabilities. That's why we need humour - to rescue us. The most endearing thing about Britain is our sense of humour.'

He finds it hard to stop taking pictures. 'I try and go on holidays, but I have to go to places which are very beautiful and undeveloped. Places with beaches, cliffs. So we go to places like Ireland or Scottish islands. But in the end there's always something there that I want to photograph.'

Many younger photographers are now hoping to find acceptance in the art world by moving away from the fashion spreads that made their name, but Parr is as perverse as ever. 'I'm going the other way!' he declares gleefully, describing a recent fashion shoot for the US men's magazine Details and another coming up for Japanese Vogue. 'I'll do anything. If fashion's out there to be done, I want the challenge of doing fashion.'

I wonder how this squares with his anticonsumerist stance, and he says I've misunderstood. 'I'm not anti-consumerism at all. I'm just saying it's part of who we are, therefore it's important to deal with it. I'm as big a consumer as anyone. I'm not preaching one way or the other. But I'm using the language and using this as the main subject matter for my work. Why shy away from it? It's so exciting and interesting to see manifestations of globalisation and consumerism.

'In the end it'll be the thing that f***s us all up,' he laughs. 'But while it's there, I'm going to spend my way to the end.'