Martin Parr - Short & Sweet
More than 60 photographs selected by the photographer together with the installation Common Sense made up of around 200 shots and an unpublished interview, to trace the career of one of the most famous contemporary documentary photographers.
“One can learn much more about the country where you live from a comedian than from a conference of sociologists." Martin Parr
His work is part of the collections of the world's leading museums: Tate, Pompidou, MOMA and dozens of others.
Martin Parr is undoubtedly one of the most recognisable and influential photographers on the planet. Perhaps because in an age where everything tends to be polarised, Parr has instead decided to focus on a huge, unexplored grey area for photography: ordinary life. Through his photos, absurd, ironic and dramatic at the same time, Martin Parr has introduced the possibility of a new language where the great landscape of society can be seen in the small things. In our obsessions, in the things we eat and wear, in our movements, our looks, in the places we frequent out of habit or status. In our seemingly insignificant everyday behaviour. Because the devil is in the detail and Martin Parr has managed to find it.
Martin Parr (born 1952) - undoubtedly one of the most established and recognised British documentary photographers of our time - chooses Mudec Photo for an exhibition project he has curated directly together with Magnum Photos, with which the Milan Museo delle Culture continues its successful collaboration on reportage and documentary photography launched in 2022 with the exhibitions on Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. This new project focuses on subjects presented to visitors in accordance with the renewed vision of the Museum, which for two years now has been increasingly focused on anthropological themes and the narration of visions of art using contemporary languages.
Produced by 24 ORE Cultura - 24 ORE Group, promoted by the Municipality of Milan - Culture Department and with the Deloitte Foundation as Institutional Partner, the Short & Sweet exhibition, open to the public from 10 February to 30 June 2024, displays over 60 photographs that Martin Parr has personally selected for this project and presented together with the body of images from the Common Sense series that made him a household name, enabling visitors to retrace, also through an unpublished interview with historian and photography critic Roberta Valtorta, the career of one of the most famous photographers of our time.
THE EXHIBITION. Adopting an unfiltered and rhetoric-free approach, the exhibition opens 'in black and white' with “The Non-Conformists”, a series of images taken between 1975 and 1980 by an unpublished, young and inspired Parr fresh out of art school. For this project, 23-year-old Martin Parr, together with his partner (and future wife) Susie Mitchell, moved from the metropolis of London to the Yorkshire suburbs. Every day for five years the couple documented the events they attended, particularly those of the Non-Conformists, named after the Methodist and Baptist chapels that were growing in number in the area. Martin photographs both the surroundings and the blue-collar lives of labourers, miners, farmers, believers, gamekeepers, pigeon fanciers and “henpecked husbands”, producing a poignant and historic document that defines northern England’s fierce independence and rejection of state Anglicism.
Before moving on to the better-known series in colour, the exhibition continues with Parr's final black-and-white project, “Bad Weather”, produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s and published in 1982. Parr's idea was to create a work centred on a British obsession. The weather proved to be the ideal subject. With an underwater camera, Parr went out to document typically British weather conditions: downpours, drizzle, snowstorms. “You are usually told to photograph only when the light is good and the sun is out,” explains Parr, “but I liked the idea of photographing only in bad weather, as a way of subverting the conventions.” With a light-hearted touch, the series observes the expressions and reactions of people constantly forced to live with biting temperatures and dreary weather. In this way, Parr’s focus is humanity rather than the iconic and well-known British landscape.
Parr's first full-colour project was “The Last Resort” (1982- 85), a bitterly ironic reportage by the photographer on the beaches of Brighton, a seaside suburb of Liverpool, in the mid-1980s at a time of deep economic decline in the northwest of England. Flitting between satire and cruelty - not without a certain affection for his English compatriots - he portrays low-income families on holiday in New Brighton, a small, declining seaside resort near Liverpool. Seen through Parr's lens, what should have looked like a summer resort takes on the air of an industrial area. In The Last Resort, Martin Parr evokes his nostalgia for the 1960s, creating the first example of a ruthless and lucid reportage on the end of a world (the working class world) and its values, as well as the advent of a new consumerist conception of life, the decadence of the society of wealth and consumption. Probably his most famous work, The Last Resort features photos taken with a medium format camera and a natural light flash, the first example of Parr’s characteristic bold saturated colour, which adds energy and vitality to his images, influenced by the American colour photography of William Eggleston (b. 1939) and Garry Winogrand (1928-84).
A similar approach is adopted for the “Common Sense” installation: over 200 A3 photographs, selected from the 350 displayed in the 1999 exhibition of the same name, which take a close look at mass consumption and waste culture, particularly in the West and Europe. Combining all the elements that had characterised Parr's photography in the 1970s and 1980s, the series continues the artist's obsessive visual search for all that is vulgar, out-of-place, absurd. When presented at the exhibition, Common Sense was installed as a large, compact series of brightly-coloured images displayed alongside each other, cheaply printed using a Xerox colour printer. The exhibition was staged simultaneously in forty-one venues in seventeen countries, earning Parr a Guinness World Record. Here, Parr excels in depicting details often associated with bad taste and contemporary vulgarity, which he captures with an underlying cynicism and unprecedented sense of sarcasm. The dynamic shots and compositions, made up of bold juxtapositions and highly kitsch objects, are taken from unusual angles, in tight close-ups and using unusual perspectives, to create photos that catch the eye and arouse the interest of the viewer. The attention to detail with which Parr manages to capture the distinctive elements of a place or situation, and thus the culture and society he is describing, becomes a fundamental trait of the series.
For the “Short & Sweet” exhibition at Mudec, “Common Sense” is presented as an accumulation of brightly coloured images, cheaply printed on A3 paper using a colour Xerox printer and readapted to the space in an original, site-specific order.
In the 1990s, Martin Parr turned his gaze to the rest of the world and the strange universe of mass tourism. The “Small World” series (1989 – 2008) once again focuses on this topic and Parr's desire to take us to many of the world’s most frequented and famous travel destinations, showing the difference between reality and the idealised mythology of these places which tourists have helped to destroy.In this series the photographer follows the footsteps of the average tourist - as we all might be - and, through his photographs, attempts to reveal the great farce of travel which, for most people, is a leisure activity that has only recently been made possible thanks to the development of large aircraft and low-cost airlines. With tourism Martin Parr presents us with a particularly cruel mirror, standardised to the point of absurdity, the world of tourism increasingly resembling a watered-down, homogenised dream, the epitome of which would be Las Vegas.
Along with tourism, there is also the theme of dance with the series "Everybody Dance Now” (1986-2018). According to Parr, after photography, dance is probably the most democratic form of expression. He combines the two arts in this series, which saw him photograph various types of dance, lively dancers, aerobics classes, parties all over the world, and tea dances, from São Paulo in Brazil to the Scottish islands, over a period of thirty years between 1986 and 2018. The work is a careful study of bodies and their proportions, skin, movements, different clothing, footwear, make-up, facial expressions during the particular leisure activity, both natural and cultural, of dancing. His shots emit a crazy energy, where the collective body manifests itself without reserve or modesty.
England has always been Martin Parr's favourite subject. His numerous comic, dogmatic, affectionately satirical and colourful photographic series document what it means to be British today. With his recent series “Establishment” (2010 – 2016), Martin Parr thus continues his major project of photographing the British establishment, the elites who rule the country and their rituals, making the obvious surprising, reinventing the clichés about the “English”, turning them into provocative revelations. Parr continues his major project of photographing the elites who rule the country and their curious rituals. There are the places and the personalities of the political world, the seats of power, the most famous universities. The research crudely highlights, as is typical of the photographer, the social conventions that are repeated over time, behaviours which are analysed down to the smallest of gestures, clothing, expressions, glances, little obsessions, the traditions that are expressed in furnishings and objects.
The exhibition continues with a theme that has always been of great interest to Parr, the beach; the “Life's a Beach” series (2013) consists of photos taken on beaches all over the world, a kaleidoscope of images of the unclothed body and its public display.In the UK you are never more than seventy-five miles away from the coast and with this much shoreline it’s not surprising that there is a strong British tradition of photography by the seaside.
People can relax, be themselves and show off all those traces of mildly eccentric British behaviour. Whereas in the US there is a strong tradition of street photography, in the UK there is 'beach photography'. Martin Parr has been photographing the beach for decades (the shots in the exhibition date from 1986 to 2018), documenting all aspects of this tradition, including close-ups of sunbathers, swimmers and picnics.
Attentive to customs, social conventions and the rules of appearance that influence the lives of those living in a globalised world, Martin Parr could not fail to observe fashion in its various guises, moving away from the conventional glamour associated with the genre to take a more humorous and satirical approach. For many years, in Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia, he has photographed not only sometimes over-the-top or absurd clothes and accessories, but also, as always, people’s postures and expressions. The “Fashion” series gathers images produced between 1999 and 2019 for fashion magazines and during fashion shows, but entirely similar to the many that Parr has taken in a wide variety of social contexts over many years of carefully and mercilessly observing the weaknesses of massified humanity.
Through a journey into his best-known projects, the original documentary style that has characterised the style of British photographer Martin Parr for over fifty years becomes the touchstone for observing contemporary society and its most contradictory aspects, those that belong to the western world and Europe in particular, expressed by an edgy photographic account, unfiltered and unrhetorical, sometimes narrated with biting sarcasm; more often presented with irony and humour. Parr's images capture comical or unexpected moments, offering a critical but also humorous look at our everyday lives.
The exhibition catalogue “Martin Parr. Short & Sweet”, published by 24 ORE Cultura, is available at the exhibition bookshop, in bookstores and online.
