This exhibition carries testamentary significance. Stricken by the cancer that claimed him at 73, Martin Parr oversaw its preparation until the very end, signing off on this ultimate act of visual resistance. Whilst he always refuted the role of environmental crusader, he witnessed the catastrophe with his own eyes. “I now realise that almost all the images I have taken and produced are indirectly linked to climate change,” he wrote on his blog in 2009.
No moral high ground on his part. His critique is both “unprogrammed” and “unmilitant,” notes Quentin Bajac, Director of the Jeu de Paume and curator of the exhibition, conceived in five chapters: beach scenes, (over)consumption, mass tourism, animal exploitation, and technological addictions. So many ways of observing how Homo Occidentalis devours the planet.
On the first floor, the exhibition opens with the “New Brighton” series, named after that popular English seaside resort north of Liverpool. Taken in the 1980s, it shows workers picnicking amidst the detritus. Flaccid, glistening bodies slumped on grey sand, surrounded by cigarette butts and plastic cups. Crime scene or ordinary ritual? Doubt is permitted.
“You get the impression that this body is actually a corpse,” comments Quentin Bajac on the photograph of a beachgoer lying face-down mere centimetres from a bulldozer. “With the construction machinery as murder weapon, and that flash lighting which flattens everything.” The image would be published in The Last Resort (1986), a book that revealed his style to the world: raw, saturated colours, framings that underscore the tragicomic potential of situations.
The photographer borrows popular aesthetics only 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, integrated 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 charge is there, acerbic. In Benidorm, Spain, or on Argentine beaches, bodies pile up everywhere with the same 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 with his British irony. Not Afghanistan, not conflict zones. No, for him it would be the aisles of Salford, Korean supermarkets, and trolleys overflowing with beer during his compatriots’ cross-Channel day trips to Calais-Boulogne. Martin Parr crisscrossed the globe, “not to photograph conflicts” but “consumer society.”
This publicly assumed position responded to his tumultuous integration into Magnum in 1994. He was admitted by a single vote, after heated debates with partisans of traditional noble photojournalism. Henri Cartier-Bresson, opposed to his entry, would speak 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 perhaps the gulf isn’t so wide. “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 prevent the maverick from running Magnum from 2013 to 2017 with the same irreverence.
His method? “Criticise and deflect.” “What interests him is highlighting the North-South imbalance, parasitising the narrative of the great tourism industries,” continues the curator. His images from Gambia and Indonesia, from the ‘Small World’ series, reveal this brutal asymmetry. White tourists photograph local children running barefoot behind their Jeep, as if on safari.
Further along, a predatory-looking tourist, smirking, sits at a table with a woman whose face is closed off, possibly a prostitute. So many artificial exchanges, distorted by power relations and domination exposed in images 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 photographs, time and again, the human concentration. 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, adding that Martin Parr “blended delightfully into the crowd,” and probably wore his own poncho.
In Autoportrait, Martin Parr has himself photographed like any tourist. In Delhi, Beijing, everywhere. The selfie stick invades his images of the 2010s. An object now banned, “almost from another time,” Quentin Bajac observes with amusement. The same obsession with phones and gaming consoles, photographed in “extremely trivial” contexts. Images “totally anti-advertising,” which nevertheless didn’t prevent Sony from commissioning him for a campaign.
The unease intensifies with “The Animal Kingdom” section. Dogs are anthropomorphised, pampered, and dressed like dolls. Whilst other animals, equally domestic, are sacrificed for meat. The animal exists only through its inscription in society, “captive or sacrificed” by man, himself caught in a system of masked domination.
In one photograph, a pigeon eats a chicken, a grotesque inversion of the natural cycle. Further on, Morris Minor carcasses abandoned in the Irish countryside (1972), like modern vanitas, speak of automotive pollution, but also nature’s resilience. Like those rural ducks gliding across the water in single file, indifferent to the wreckage lying above them.
Forty years later: a family in deckchairs watches agricultural machinery belching clouds of smoke at the Dorset Steam Fair. “An incongruous, absurd spectacle,” comments Bajac. The fair no longer exists today. This image, taken in 2022, captures a vanished world that still 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 strategy inherited from Aristotle and Horace: docere et placere. To seduce in order to better question. In this, Martin Parr’s visual humour inscribes itself in a British satirical tradition reaching back to William Hogarth, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Rowlandson.
Entertainment serves critical, even ferocious, reflection. Triviality becomes 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 shop resonates like a profane Last Judgement.
In Acropolis Now (2022), his final book, Martin Parr assembles photographs of tourists in Athens whose prints have been damaged by water. Mould, chromatic alterations: the images seem 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 liked 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 show at the Jeu de Paume until 24 May 2026.
The Global Warning exhibition catalogue is available at 39.95€.
