His gaze is immediately recognisable, a magnifying glass a bright colors that creates stories starting from reality, that captures authentic and often eccentric moments of everyday life capturing the essence of a place or situation through research perfect detailwhich offers a
to unique and often provocative perspective on contemporary society.
Martin Parr (born 1952) – undoubtedly one of the most successful and recognized British documentary photographers of our time – chooses the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna to present the exhibition project Short & Sweetwhich he directly edited, after the widespread public success recently achieved at Mudec – Museum of Cultures of Milan.
Until January 6, 2025 the exhibition Martin Parr. Short & Sweet – produced by 24 ORE Culture – 24 ORE Group in collaboration with the Civic Archaeological Museum of the Bologna Civic Museums Sector And Magnum Photosand with the patronage of Municipality of Bologna – presents over 60 photographs selected by him specifically for this project and placed alongside the corpus of images from the series Common Sense, which made him famous, to retrace, even through a unpublished interview edited by the historian and critic of photography Roberta Valtortathe career of one of the most famous photographers of our time.
Through a photographic chronicle without filters and without rhetoric, the exhibition path opens up ‘black and white’or with the series The Non-Conformistsimages taken from 1975 to 1980 by an unprecedented, young and inspired Parr, who had just finished art school. For this project, the author at the age of twenty-three, together with his partner (and future wife) Susie Mitchell, moves 
of the London metropolis towards the suburbs of Yorkshire. For five years the couple documented the events they witnessed on a daily basis, in particular those of Nonconformists, named after the Methodist and Baptist chapels that were becoming numerous in the area. Martin photographs both the surrounding environment and the blue-collar lives of factory workers, miners, farmers, devotees, gamekeepers, pigeon breeders and “husbands led by the nose”, producing a historic and moving document that defines the fiercely independent character of the Northern England from State Anglicism.
Before arriving at the more well-known color series, the exhibition continues with the latest black and white project developed by Parr, Bad Weatheraccomplished between the end of the Seventies and the beginning of the Eighties and published in 1982. The idea was to create a work centered on a British obsession. The weather provided an ideal subject. With an underwater camera, Parr throws himself under typical English weather conditions: showers, drizzles, snowstorms documented
strictly between England and Ireland. “You are usually told to only take photographs when the light is good and the sun is shining – states the author – and I liked the idea of taking photographs only in bad weather, as a way of subverting traditional rules”. With light-hearted seriousness, the series combines expressions and reactions of people who live constantly enduring bitter temperatures and gloomy weather. Parr, in this way, turns his gaze to humanity rather than the iconic and well-known British landscape.
The first color project is The Last Resort (1982-1985), bitterly ironic reportage conducted by the photographer on the beaches of Brighton, a seaside suburb of Liverpool, in the mid-eighties, i.e. in a period of profound economic decline in the north-west of England. Between satire and cruelty – not without a certain tenderness for his English compatriots – portrays low-income families on holiday in New Brighton, a small declining seaside resort near Liverpool. Seen through his lens, what should have looked like a summer resort takes on the look of an industrial area. In The Last Resort Martin Parr evokes his nostalgia for the sixties, creating the first example of merciless and lucid reportage on the end of a world (the working class one) and its valuesas well the advent of a new consumerist conception of lifethe decadence of the society of well-being and consumption.
Probably his most famous work, The Last Resort features photos taken with a medium format camera and natural light flash, prime example of the distinctive and bold saturated color of Parrwhich adds energy and vitality to his images, influenced by the American color photography of William Eggleston (b. 1939) and Garry Winogrand (1928-1984).
The installation is maintained in the same registry Common Sense: they will be visible at the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna 250 photographs in A3 formatselected from the 350 exhibited in the 1999 exhibition of the same name, which offer a close-up study of the mass consumption and of culture of wasteparticularly Western and European. Combining all the elements that had characterized Parr’s photography in the seventies and eighties, the series follows the artist’s obsessive visual research of everything that is vulgar, out of tune, absurd.
When presented on display, Common Sense it is installed as a large, compact series of brightly colored images side by side, printed cheaply using a color Xerox machine. The exhibition was held simultaneously in forty-one locations in seventeen countries, thus achieving the Guinness World Record. Parr excels here in his rendering of subjects often linked to bad taste and contemporary vulgaritywhich he catches with a cynicism background and a sarcasm unprecedented.
The shots and dynamic compositions, made of bold combinations of heavily kitsch objects, are shot from unusual angles, with close-ups and using new perspectives, thus creating shots that capture attention and arouse interest. It becomes fundamental attention to detailthrough which Parr manages to grasp the distinctive elements of a place or a situation, and therefore ultimately of the culture and society that he finds himself describing. For the exhibition Short & Sweet, Common Sense it presents itself as an accumulation of brightly colored images, printed cheaply on A3 paper with a color Xerox machine and rearranged into the space according to an original order.
In the nineties the gaze turns to the rest of the world and the strange universe of mass tourism. The series Small World (1989-2008) once again concerns this theme and the photojournalist’s desire to take us to many of the most popular and famous sites, showing the difference between the idealized mythology of the place and the reality plundered by the “use” that the tourist makes of the place itself. In this series, the author follows in the footsteps of the average tourist – as we all could be – and, through his photographs, attempts to reveal the great farce of the tripwhich is, for most people, a leisure activity made possible only recently, following the development of large aircraft and low-cost airlines. With tourism, Martin Parr presents us with a particularly cruel mirrorstandardized to the point of absurdity, the world of tourism increasingly resembles
a watered-down and homogenized dream, whose ultimate model would be Las Vegas.
Together with tourism there is also the theme of dance with the series Everybody Dance Now (1986-2018). According to Parr, apart from photography, the dance it probably is the most democratic form of expression. He unites the two arts in this research in which, from Sao Paulo in Brazil to the Scottish islands, he photographed for over thirty years, between 1986 and 2018, various types of dance, lively dancers, aerobics lessons, parties everywhere of the world, tea dances. The work is a detailed study on bodies, on their proportions and on the skin, on the movements, the different clothes, the footwear, the make-up, the expressions of the faces in that particular free time activity, both natural and cultural, which for everyone is dancing. It emerges from his shots crazy energyWhere the collective body manifests itself without reservations and modesty.
THE’England has always been Martin Parr’s favorite subject. His many comical, dogmatic, affectionately satirical and colorful photographic series document what it means to be English today. With the recent series Establishment (2010-2016) therefore continues the great project of photographing the British establishment, the elites who govern the country and their rituals, making the obvious surprising, reinventing the clichés of “Englishness”turning them into provocative revelations. Here, therefore, are the places and personalities of politics, the seats of power, the most famous universities. The research crudely highlights, as is typical of the author, the social conventions that are repeated over time, the behaviors analyzed down to the smallest gestures, the clothing, the expressions, the looks, the small obsessions, the traditions that are expressed in furnishings and objects.
We continue with a subject that Parr has always dealt with, the beach. The series Life’s a Beach(2013) shows shots from beaches all over the world, in a kaleidoscope of images of the undressed body and its display in public. In the UK, it’s impossible to be more than 75 miles from the coast, and with so much sea it’s no surprise that there is a strong tradition of taking photos on the beach in Britain. People can relax, be themselves and show off all the little aspects of that slightly eccentric behavior that is typical of the British. In the United States there is a strong tradition of street photography, in the United Kingdom ‘beach photography’. Martin Parr has been photographing this subject for many decades (the shots presented in the exhibition range from 1986 to 2018), documenting all aspects of this tradition, including close-ups of bathers, swims and picnics.
Attentive to customs, social conventions and the rules of appearance that influence the lives of those who live in the globalized world, Martin Parr could not help but observe fashion in its various meanings, moving away from the conventional glamor associated with the genre, but rather always insisting on a witty and satirical approach. For many years he photographed in Europe, the United States, Africa and Asia not only the sometimes exaggerated or absurd clothes and accessories but, as always, also the postures and expressions.
The series Fashion collects images produced between 1999 and 2019 for fashion magazines and on the occasion of fashion shows, but completely similar to the many that Parr has created in the most varied social contexts in many years of precise and implacable observation of the weaknesses of massified humanity.
Through a journey through the most well-known projects, the original documentary style that has characterized the language of the English photographer Martin Parr for over fifty years becomes a litmus test for observe contemporary society and its most contradictory aspectsthose that belong to the Western world, particularly European, returned by a sharp photographic chronicle, sometimes told with biting sarcasm, more often presented with irony and humor. Parr’s images capture comical or unexpected moments, offering a critical but also humorous look at the daily lives of all of us.
Carlo Franza