Martin Parr - Four Decades

Since the start of his career, Martin Parr has been fascinated with social behaviour, the manner in which people furnish their homes, the foods they choose to eat, the clothes they choose to wear and the places they choose to go on holiday. As he catalogued these everyday routines, his vision became increasing keen and ironic.

The exhibit includes some of his early black and white photographs from the Seventies, taken in Manchester, in Yorkshire in East Sussex; the domestic interiors from the Home Sweet Home (1974) series and various images from the Last Resort (1983-86), Small World (1987-94), Bored Couples (1991-93), Common Sense (1995-99) and Luxury (2009) series which have been placed in juxtaposition in order to present a retrospective vision of Martin Parr's special photographic language.

A common thread which runs through all of his works is his meticulous contemplation of consumerism, intended not only in terms of life-style but also as a ludicrous ideology of modern society.

Above all, his work is a reflection upon photography as a means of representing what is real in a world in which the boundaries between reality and its image are increasingly blurred.

Martin Parr was born in 1952 in Epsom, England. Since 1994, he has been a member of the Magnum Photographic Corporation. His photographs can be found in numerous international public collections including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Paul Ghetty Center of Los Angeles, the MOMA in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum and the Tate Modern in Londra. In June, 2009, the Jeu de Paume National Gallery in Paris featured an exhibit entitled Planéte Parr which combined many of his more well-known photographs and his collection of strange, heteroclitic objects reflecting the emptiness of consumer society.

Martin Parr
Four Decades