Parr For The Course:Martin Parr @ Cromwell Place.

"Taking the picture isn't the most important thing. Anyone can take a picture nowadays. Being a photographer means knowing how to choose an image" - Martin Parr

With his own words, I open my case against the celebrated photographer Martin Parr whose Deja View exhibition, in conjunction with the film director Lee Shulman - though it's hard to see what he's actually contributed, at Kensington's surprisingly vast Cromwell Place (you could get lost in there, I did) I visited recently.

I used to like Parr. But then I used to like sneering at people and looking down on them. I like to think that, at least in some ways, I've matured since then. I'm a big fan of the work of Mike Leigh but I find Abigail's Party unbearably snooty. All that disdain for the lower middle class because of what they eat, what they wear, what they consider to be cultural, and how they may, on occasion, mispronounce difficult, or foreign, words.

Parr, at least, is an equal opportunities offender. He doesn't just laugh at the lower middle class, he laughs at the working class too. There's something very late nineties/early noughties about his work. It reminds me of the time before social media where round robin e-mails of ugly men and women, and - best of all - tasteless wedding photos, would regularly ping into my inbox.

How we'd all laugh at these barbarians. But if we're laughing at other people because of how they look or how they dress, or because they're poor, then we are the ones who are the true barbarians. I'm not saying Martin Parr is necessarily saying these people are idiots or even saying that they're simply ill advised. But looking at his photos it's hard to escape that conclusion.

Look at that simpleton standing in front of a pyramid but taking a photo away from it, look at those kids with more ice cream smeared around their faces than in their bellies, look at that old couple (who look a bit like my gran and grandad) sat on deck chairs in a beauty spot. They seem almost proud to own that not particularly fancy car.

Socks with sandals, tinned ham, Spam, giant plastic dinosaurs, an Austin Allegro in a safari park. Aren't the British at play a funny bunch? It could be that Parr is actually celebrating these ordinary, and extraordinary, British pastimes but it never really feels like that.

Food seems to feature regularly in his work and often it's unhealthy looking and luridly coloured. It's tasteless food in both senses of the word. Tasteless food for tasteless people. What sort of monster would eat this stuff?

What sort of photographer would choose to make these people look stupid? They look to me, mostly, like happy families getting on with their lives, trying to live within their means. I think, on balance, I'd rather be the old dear sat in her car reading the TV listings in her paper or the man, her husband perhaps, stood in front taking a photo of nature's beauty than Martin Parr stood to the side smiling contemptuously as he takes yet another photo of people he clearly believes he's better than.