Since All the things Should Go  — Blind Journal

This exhibition carries testamentary significance. Stricken by the most cancers that claimed him at 73, Martin Parr oversaw its preparation till the very finish, signing off on this final act of visible resistance. Whilst he all the time refuted the position of environmental crusader, he witnessed the disaster together with his personal eyes. “I now realise that almost all the images I have taken and produced are indirectly linked to climate change,” he wrote on his weblog in 2009.

No ethical excessive floor on his half. His critique is each “unprogrammed” and “unmilitant,” notes Quentin Bajac, Director of the Jeu de Paume and curator of the exhibition, conceived in 5 chapters: seaside scenes, (over)consumption, mass tourism, animal exploitation, and technological addictions. So some ways of observing how Homo Occidentalis devours the planet.

On the primary flooring, the exhibition opens with the “New Brighton” sequence, named after that fashionable English seaside resort north of Liverpool. Taken within the Eighties, it exhibits staff picnicking amidst the detritus. Flaccid, glistening our bodies slumped on gray sand, surrounded by cigarette butts and plastic cups. Crime scene or odd ritual? Doubt is permitted.

“You get the impression that this body is actually a corpse,” feedback Quentin Bajac on the {photograph} of a beachgoer mendacity face-down mere centimetres from a bulldozer. “With the construction machinery as murder weapon, and that flash lighting which flattens everything.” The picture can be revealed in The Last Resort (1986), a ebook that exposed his fashion to the world: uncooked, saturated colors, framings that underscore the tragicomic potential of conditions.

The photographer borrows fashionable aesthetics solely to subvert them. “Do not take boring photographs,” Tony Ray-Jones, his mentor, taught him. “When I take a photograph, I try to say something. Beyond the garish colours, there is a political message,” confided Martin Parr, built-in into the very system he denounces. “I participate in the problem I photograph,” he would repeat.

“He openly acknowledged that he had a terrible carbon footprint, that he constantly flew, that he loved going to the beach and shopping,” insists Quentin Bajac. Nevertheless, the cost is there, acerbic. In Benidorm, Spain, or on Argentine seashores, our bodies pile up all over the place with the identical density. “For him, the beach was a microcosm of our civilisation,” underlines Quentin Bajac.

“Criticise and deflect”

“The supermarket is my front line,” the photographer would quip together with his British irony. Not Afghanistan, not battle zones. No, for him it will be the aisles of Salford, Korean supermarkets, and trolleys overflowing with beer throughout his compatriots’ cross-Channel day journeys to Calais-Boulogne. Martin Parr crisscrossed the globe, “not to photograph conflicts” however “consumer society.”

This publicly assumed place responded to his tumultuous integration into Magnum in 1994. He was admitted by a single vote, after heated debates with partisans of conventional noble photojournalism. Henri Cartier-Bresson, against his entry, would converse of “two different solar systems” to characterise their respective approaches. Martin Parr replied: “There is a gulf between your celebration of life and my implicitly critical gaze.”

Yet maybe the gulf isn’t so vast. “Martin Parr is a humanist with a form of empathy for his subjects,” defends Quentin Bajac. “A moralist in the 17th-century sense, working on behaviours in the manner of a La Bruyère or La Fontaine.” His detractors wouldn’t forestall the maverick from operating Magnum from 2013 to 2017 with the identical irreverence.

His methodology? “Criticise and deflect.” “What interests him is highlighting the North-South imbalance, parasitising the narrative of the great tourism industries,” continues the curator. His photos from Gambia and Indonesia, from the ‘Small World’ sequence, reveal this brutal asymmetry. White vacationers {photograph} native kids operating barefoot behind their Jeep, as if on safari.

Further alongside, a predatory-looking vacationer, smirking, sits at a desk with a lady whose face is closed off, presumably a prostitute. So many synthetic exchanges, distorted by energy relations and domination uncovered in photos by Martin Parr. “My work is to document the headlong rush of the Western world,” the photographer asserted.

The reign of the selfie stick

In Venice, he images, repeatedly, the human focus. At Machu Picchu, he exposes the mass of silhouettes draped in plastic ponchos. “This atrocity of the 2000s is a temporal marker, like the logo cap of the 1990s,” notes Quentin Bajac, including that Martin Parr “blended delightfully into the crowd,” and doubtless wore his personal poncho.

In Autoportrait, Martin Parr has himself photographed like several vacationer. In Delhi, Beijing, all over the place. The selfie stick invades his photos of the 2010s. An object now banned, “almost from another time,” Quentin Bajac observes with amusement. The identical obsession with telephones and gaming consoles, photographed in “extremely trivial” contexts. Images “totally anti-advertising,” which however didn’t forestall Sony from commissioning him for a marketing campaign.

The unease intensifies with “The Animal Kingdom” part. Dogs are anthropomorphised, pampered, and dressed like dolls. Whilst different animals, equally home, are sacrificed for meat. The animal exists solely by means of its inscription in society, “captive or sacrificed” by man, himself caught in a system of masked domination.

In one {photograph}, a pigeon eats a rooster, a grotesque inversion of the pure cycle. Further on, Morris Minor carcasses deserted within the Irish countryside (1972), like trendy vanitas, converse of automotive air pollution, but additionally nature’s resilience. Like these rural geese gliding throughout the water in single file, detached to the wreckage mendacity above them.

Forty years later: a household in deckchairs watches agricultural equipment belching clouds of smoke on the Dorset Steam Fair. “An incongruous, absurd spectacle,” feedback Bajac. The truthful now not exists right this moment. This picture, taken in 2022, captures a vanished world that also celebrated its polluting machines. Here, Martin Parr cleverly subverts the Victorian fascination of a William Turner for steam into grotesque spectacle.

“I create entertainment,” Martin Parr affirmed. “My images carry a profound message, if one chooses to view them thus, but I don’t claim to change anyone’s opinion.” A technique inherited from Aristotle and Horace: docere et placere. To seduce with a purpose to higher query. In this, Martin Parr’s visible humour inscribes itself in a British satirical custom reaching again to William Hogarth, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Rowlandson.

Entertainment serves vital, even ferocious, reflection. Triviality turns into weaponry. “I’m an optimist by nature, but when I think about the planet, the depression wins out in the end,” he confided. The inscription “Last Day” on a bankrupt store resonates like a profane Last Judgement.

In Acropolis Now (2022), his closing ebook, Martin Parr assembles images of vacationers in Athens whose prints have been broken by water. Mould, chromatic alterations: the pictures appear to be fading away. “As if in two millennia archaeologists were extracting banal snapshots from a world before,” writes Quentin Bajac. An unwitting prophecy for Martin Parr, who favored to say: “We’re heading for catastrophe, but we’re all going there together. It’s a total disaster.”

Martin Parr’s exhibition, “Global Warning”, is on present on the Jeu de Paume till 24 May 2026.

The Global Warning exhibition catalogue is out there at 39.95€.