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MARTIN PARR AT THE JEU DE PAUME - GLOBAL WARNING

Inspirations

One-hundred and eighty works span a journey through Martin Parr’s oeuvre from the 1970s to the present day: this retrospective dedicated to this master of photography, who passed away late last year, is a majestic display at the Jeu de Paume museum. It is dedicated to the man who, with typical British stiff upper lip, documented with visionary insight the follies and consumerist frenzies, dependence on technology, and mass tourism – from overcrowded beaches to shopping malls, from zoos to the Swiss mountains. This remarkable exhibition is the artist's last. “I now see that almost all the images I have taken and produced recently are indirectly related to climate change,” he wrote in his blog in 2009.

From beaches to rubbish, from Northern locations to South destinations – through his lens, reality takes on an unreal dimension, marked by a vision that overlooks no detail and captures the gargantuan mid-flight. From the early 1980s onwards, he portrayed Margaret Thatcher's Britain by going against the codes of advertising photography, which years later would come to regard him as a master. “We are heading towards disaster, but we are all going there together. No one will dare to ban cars or air travel,” he asserted in 2022. The world according to Parr is a pleasure to rediscover, a polychrome lesson in humour and rigour. “Imagine a generative artificial intelligence trained exclusively on Martin Parr's photographs,” says Quentin Bajac, curator of the exhibition and director of the Jeu de Paume. “The images it would produce would undoubtedly offer a portrait of a world saturated with supermarkets, shopping malls, crowded beaches and leisure complexes, where the landscapes would be punctuated by a relentless repetition of visual signs cloned across the globe.”

Martin Parr was not only an immense photographer, he was also someone whose greatness lay precisely in his ability to mock everything that was immense and pretentious. He made visible everything we preferred not to see. 

 

L.B.

 

1, place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries Paris 1er • Mo Concorde (lines 1, 8, 12)
+33 (0) 1 47 03 12 50 • jeudepaume.org. Until May 24, 2026. 

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