How about a picture puzzle this weekend?
11. September 2019
Chicken “on the sunny side” of life
27. September 2019
“Everyone is a photographer.”
“Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That’s the great thing about photography.” The English photographer Martin Parr (*1952) remains relaxed about this statement. The constant photographing with the smartphone, of everyone and everything in a sheer endless flood of pictures, quite simply because it works, and the upload into the endless vastness of the Internet, precisely because it works, has little to do with what he does.
Martin Parr became famous in the 80s as a chronicler of British everyday life. In the beginning it was actually the proverbial bad weather in England. Photographs of people who save themselves more or less dry with umbrellas, headscarves and dripping wet hats, sometimes also cardboard boxes and tarpaulins, from the never-ending torrents. This usually looks pathetic. When you look at it, you can feel how the rain runs cold and wet into your collar. The black and white, in which this series is still kept, supports the cloudy wet mood. Parr later switches to color film. Whereby “color film” sounds almost too neutral to adequately describe Parr’s color explosions of the later years. Parr’s color bangs at the viewer with extremely high saturation. Supported by bright flashlight, with which Parr always illuminates his motifs, even in daylight.
Outright documentation
Parr actually seems to “just stick to it”. His pictures don’t seem staged at all, but rather immediate, direct, unembellished. His subject is man, in all his forms. This usually seems anything but beautiful, in fact, rather disturbing, bizarre, ugly. “The Last Resort”, with which Parr documented the British hustle and bustle on the beach in run-down holiday resorts in the 1980s, has made Parr internationally famous. The reviews remain ambivalent: is his gaze merely authentic, “unembellished” and chronic, or rather merciless, condescending, almost malicious when it comes to illuminating the inadequate, grotesque, pathetic? Literally to the last corner.
“Life is a beach.”
Who wouldn’t like to be on the beach. The idiom “Life is a beach”, which – in contrast to the almost identical sounding “Life is a bitch” – focuses on the beautiful and pleasant in life, is also expressed in Parr. Somehow at least. Because Parr is interested in what people do in their free time.
Beach life has often been Parr’s theme. Not only in New Brighton, but also in Cuba and India. The view through the burning glass, on tourist “insider tips” that have long since ceased to be and for this very reason are lost, or have already been lost. Not only in the demolished beach, but also in the exuberant world of the rich and super-rich between Munich, Moscow, Miami, Beijing and Dubai or Durban, which he exhibits in the series “Luxury”. The sophisticated artefacts of this world, chinchilla furs and champagne, rosy haute couture stretching across buxom hips, however, are hardly any different from the greasy burger-wit-frits and sweetened giant ice cream sundaes, fish & chips on plastic plates and brightly coloured bagels in “Common Sense”.
Martin Parr is actually a collector.
Not only in his photo series, which meticulously compile what the leisure activities of the people have to offer in such a highly diverse way, but also in the very original sense. Parr is a passionate collector of postcards and photo books, as well as Margaret Thatcher devotional items and Saddam Hussein watches. Perhaps it is this passionate, not to say almost compulsive collecting, the will to accumulate things with care and to sort them as completely as possible, the inner incentive that also constitutes Parr’s photographic art.
Martin Parr has come up with something special for his retrospective in Düsseldorf. He photographed allotment gardeners in the Rhineland. The pictures of very different people in their green hideaways, by the way, manage without garden gnome malice. They show between lush beds, pensioners and hipsters, families and robust lone fighters, partly with the insignia of their work, from the rake to the lawn mower. Martin Parr documents this with great respect. He does not make fun of them at all. And the cynicism and irony attributed to his earlier works is also missing here. Perhaps this is not even necessary. And it’s simply an invitation, after careful consideration, to form one’s own differentiated picture.
So take a close look and see for yourself. Have fun!
