Paris,
One of the last exhibitions in whose preparation Martin Parr was able to participate, before his death in December of last year, is “Global warning”, which will open to the public on January 30 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. It is likely that, for this reason, his rooms are tinged with nostalgia, although the British man would surely have hated that sensation: his images, from the seventies until his death, were marked by irony, the satirical and non-moralizing examination of our social tics, the obvious but playful criticism.
Almost two hundred works will be gathered in Paris, representative of his entire career, in which we will see that he documented the symptoms of what we can understand as crises in materially privileged societies: mass tourism, unbridled consumerism, technological dependencies and an ambivalent relationship, to say the least, with nature. There are those who have appreciated in their humor when addressing these issues the heritage of their country’s rich satirical tradition; a modern-day version of Britain’s past visual wars against conventions in representation, substance and form.
His portrait of the globalized world, funny and disturbing in equal measure, was born from collecting snapshots in shopping malls, crowded beaches, zoos, at vehicle shows or in the Swiss mountains; The scenarios did not matter too much, but rather the behaviors that in those places individuals give themselves the right to display: banal, absurd and fundamentally revealing.
His aesthetic is almost unmistakable: he began in black and white, but soon turned towards saturated tones, tight frames, the accumulation of details and a clear taste for kitsch and contrasts. This style, consolidated over the half century that has passed since the seventies, allows for an interpretation of his work in several layers: we can stay with the anecdote contemplated in immediacy, but also with his constant subversion of the codes of elegance and his challenge to the parameters of various genres of photography, such as advertising, postcards or wildlife photography. By paying attention to their languages, Parr reveals their artifice, their clichés and everything that seemed, in that type of prints, to be taken for granted.
Five sections will structure this exhibition, focusing on recurring themes, motifs and obsessions that, as the artist saw in his last years, had a deep relationship with the progressive degradation of the environment, even though he did not maintain any desire for activism.
He insistently taught us how leisure activities alter the environment; that apparently indissoluble union that we have established between pleasure and the generation of waste, the natural and the artificial. Parr offered us a crude and humorous inventory of our objects of desire and our modes of consumption, seen as an expression of a new religion: through his lens, supermarkets, shopping centers, fairs and exhibitions become scenes of a frenetic race, shared by all social classes, in which human beings themselves sometimes become commodities.
But the greatest of his obsessions was tourism, which he explored in both its pleasures and its contradictions, even in its dead ends. In the most visited places, he focused on the habits and behaviors of the global tourist, also suggesting a subtle study of the imbalances between hemispheres. Regarding our coexistence with animals, he was interested in the confluence on the human side of indifference and fascination, negligence and over-attention, violence and affection.
He also cared about our gradually more intimate ties with machines: cars, video games, slot machines and, in his later years, also computers and smartphones that redefine our relationship with reality, space and time. Parr himself conceived of his photos as a form of entertainment that contains a serious message if one is willing to read it, but he claimed not to try to convince anyone of anything: I just show what people think they know.he declared in 2021. That’s how you often are, even if you don’t see yourselfhe seemed to say.
Never pretentious, he insisted that he was part of the world he documented and criticized: We are heading towards catastrophe, but all together. No one will dare to ban cars or air travel. He was even aware of his (high) carbon footprint and refused to adopt a stance of superiority over those he photographed.
Aware that images alone are no longer enough to transform the world, he did conceive them as a certain form of resistance: that of someone who is aware of the drifts and the distant possibility of reversing them and teaches them to us. With tenderness and other things.
Martin Parr. “Global warning”
JEU DE PAUME
1 Place de la Concorde
Paris
From January 30 to May 24, 2026
