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Martin Parr, who died final December aged 73, was greatest recognized for his extremely saturated coloration work. But earlier than The Last Resort introduced him to fame in 1986, he’d spent years mastering black-and-white images with the identical forensic eye and wry humour.
Now a brand new exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, England, reveals precisely what that appeared like.
The present facilities round his ultimate main black-and-white undertaking, shot in rural Ireland within the early Eighties. A Fair Day, operating from February 06 to April 19 2026, reveals work that Parr himself felt had been overshadowed by his later tasks.
Poignantly, he’d been planning this exhibition with the gallery all through 2025 – believing that these pictures spoke to up to date debates round group and social change. Now, posthumously, they provide us an opportunity to review the craft foundations that underpinned his profession.
Technical shift
Here, working in rural communities during ‘fair days’ (gatherings for trade, entertainment and religious observance), Parr deployed patience and a keen eye, rather than the confrontational intimacy of his later macro work.
These are silver gelatin prints, now extremely rare, showing traditional darkroom craft. The tonal range, composition and timing reveal a photographer who’d thoroughly mastered classical documentary technique before later choosing to abandon it for something more provocative.
The photographs document Ireland in transition: cattle trading and horse fairs alongside abandoned Morris Minors and partygoers in 1980s fashion. At first glance, these scenes appear timeless. But look closer and you spot plastic cups at holy wells, TV aerials creeping into pastoral scenes.
This was exactly the kind of detail-oriented observation that would later define Parr’s color work, yet rendered with the subtlety that monochrome affords. The conclusion is striking: Parr’s eye for the telling detail, the gap between tradition and modernity, the absurdity hiding in plain sight; all this existed before the color and flash made it unmissable.
Avoiding clichés
Even in monochrome, Parr’s images avoid the romantic clichés into which documentary photography about rural Ireland easily falls. The exhibition text notes his “characteristic wit ensured the images avoided cliché.”
That wit – the slight distance, the eye for contradiction, the refusal to sentimentalize – would become more obvious in the color work, but it’s fully present here in more subtle form.
For photographers working in black-and-white today, these images offer a template for how to be affectionate without being reverential, observant without being voyeuristic, documentary without being didactic.
With the complete arc of his career now visible, these shots reveal how much his approach was consistent across technical changes. The same eye that saw plastic cups at holy wells in 1982 would see Union Jack deckchairs on littered beaches in 1984. The medium changed. The seeing didn’t.
These photographs remind us that before Martin Parr changed documentary photography, he had to learn how to do it the traditional way first. He just did it better than most.
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