Martin Parr, Chichen Itza, Mexico, 2002, archival pigment print on paper, 41 x 61 inches (framed)

Martin Parr
The Parr Survey

October 26 through December 16, 2023
Opens Thursday, October 26, 6–8pm

Harper’s Chelsea 534 + Harper's Books
534 + 504 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm

Harper’s is pleased to announce The Parr Survey, Martin Parr’s second solo presentation with the gallery. The Parr Survey is a curated selection of the acclaimed artist’s most notable photographs to date. The Parr Survey opens at Harper’s Chelsea 534 and Harper's Books on Thursday, October 26, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.

Martin Parr was born in 1952 in the town of Epsom, England. As the grandson of an amateur photographer, Parr’s passion for documentary photography was encouraged throughout his childhood. He pursued formal training in the medium in the early 1970s at Manchester Polytechnic, after which he produced his first serious body of work, The Non-Conformists. From 1975 to 1982, the artist documented the decline of agricultural communities in striking black-and-white photographs of rural life in West Yorkshire, Manchester, and Ireland. In his subsequent series, The Last Resort, Parr introduced his signature color saturation—which would become the cornerstone of his visual language—to capture the working-class beach town, New Brighton.

The photographer’s renowned projects since, including The Cost of Living (1987–1989), Small World (1987–1994), Common Sense (1995–1999), among others, continue to render the banal with unwavering criticality, quick-witted humor, and searing color palettes. His influence on the medium of photography has been recognized in over 80 exhibitions globally over the past four decades. Parr has been a longtime member of the prestigious international photographic cooperative, Magnum Photos, and has received countless awards including the Sony World Photography Award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography, the Erich Salomon Prize, and the PHotoEspaña Lifetime Achievement Award to name just a few. 

At the core of Parr’s expansive practice is a curiosity about the ways in which visual culture informs the production of social realities, and he is also an avid collector of media across varied forms of dissemination. Parr has amassed one of the largest photography book collections in the world and has been an influential purveyor of the importance of the photobook within the art world, but more urgently, among broader socio-cultural and political contexts. 

Parr has authored over 120 books and catalogs, including Conventional Photography, commissioned by CNN and published by Harper’s Books, to document the Republican and Democratic conventions during the 2016 United States presidential election. Throughout his career, Parr has repeatedly presented social divides and partisan political imaginaries with a candid yet amusing gaze: The artist reveals comedic irony in scenes of leisure, consumption, and everyday routine across Western society. As he excavates the absurd in the pedestrian, he also uncovers narratives of nationalism and class. 

These recurring themes come to the fore in the selection of photographs that comprise The Parr Survey. The discussion of class takes center stage in works like New Brighton, England, 1983-85. The work captures a throng of beachgoers as they swarm a hot dog counter. Some stand in line restlessly as they await their turn to order while others messily apply ketchup from sticky bottles. The photograph, which provokes a tone of sun-weathered impatience with hyperreal precision, acknowledges those no-frills, affordable lunch counters critical to the social fabric of the working class. Parr’s razor-sharp use of color and organic staging here is emblematic of his forthright approach to documenting working-class quotidian life––the primary subject for his groundbreaking series, The Last Resort.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, we see Parr shift his gaze towards the middle class with questions of tourism and globalization becoming more prominent in his work. In Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy, 1990, a bevy of tourists pose in front of the beloved Italian monument. As they prepare to be photographed, many of them outstretch their arms as if threatening to topple the inclined building over. In documenting this recognizable gesture, which has become tethered to the representation of the tower in popular culture, Parr invites careful study of the visual media that permeates tourism. In doing so, he makes a case for the ways in which images support geopolitical strategies like globalization that rely on consumers to facilitate transnational exchange.

In his photographs from the past two decades, Parr continues to dissect geographies for collective leisure. From the sacred temples in Mexico featured in Chichen Itza, Mexico, 2002, to the coveted beaches that grace the Amalfi Coast as seen in Positano, Italy, 2013, the artist is drawn to opportune sites from which he can divulge societal habits, political systems, and cultural trends. Parr is acutely aware of the ways in which images erect the discourse of place. In describing the beguiling nature of images he writes, “the fundamental thing I’m exploring constantly is the difference between the mythology of the place and the reality of it.” Ultimately, for Parr, images are rarely just visual documents. Across The Parr Survey, the artist beckons viewers to look closer: the deluge of imagery in our mediascapes reveal subtle social truths that are not always immediately apparent at first glance. 

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Martin Parr, New Brighton, England (Ice Cream Girl), 1983-5, archival pigment print, 17 x 21 inches (framed)

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