A brilliantly human photographer, he celebrated the overlooked, finding beauty in cheese sandwiches at a church fete or people queuing for ice cream at the beach – all while poking fun at Britishness

• Martin Parr dies aged 73
• Martin Parr: the photographer’s career in pictures

Martin Parr looked like “a naff birdwatcher”, according to his editor Wendy Jones. His appearance was so unassuming that he told me during a recent public talk, that while he was taking pictures during a recent seaside trip, some passersby remarked that he was “a bit like Martin Parr”. Unbothered by glitz and glamour, for more than five decades Parr purposefully pursued the most boring things he could find – he was unapologetic about the excitement he saw in a perfect cup of tea, a plate of beans on toast, or a woman filling up her car at a petrol station. He also knew that, with time, these supposedly dull things would become interesting.

Parr took delight in looking, without flattery, at the things you thought you already knew. In a Parr picture, beauty is not always graceful – the overflowing rubbish at New Brighton beach, the cucumber and cheese sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm at Shalfleet church fete (with the sign, please do take ONE cherry tomato). He made the mundane magnificent with his panache for saturated colours and surprising compositions. He was masterful at capturing the unexpected and unchoreographed interruptions that reveal the unpolished truth of the ordinary moment. He understood that the fluorescent glow of a chip shop could be as revealing as a cathedral; that the colour of a plastic beach bucket could anchor the entire mood of a nation; that the way a stranger holds a sandwich or an ice-cream speaks of class, of longing, of place, of the small stories that batter or buoy us daily. This radical attentiveness – this celebration of the overlooked – is what made Parr one of the most human photographers of our time.