Highly saturated images of food, families spending their holidays on crowded beaches, tourists posing for commemorative photographs in front of famous landmarks, shoppers carrying bags, and spectators filling sports stadiums: the photographs of British photographer Martin Parr (1952–2025) do not focus on historic events or exceptional individuals. Instead, they depict people, places, and behaviors commonly encountered in everyday life.
 
In Parr’s photographs, however, ordinary scenes no longer appear ordinary. Figures captured at close range, food and consumer goods filling the frame, and expressions and gestures that seem humorous yet strangely familiar reveal the lifestyles and desires of contemporary people. Through these everyday behaviors, Parr consistently examined how consumption, class, taste, and self-presentation shape individual identity.
 
Currently on view at the Photography Seoul Museum of Art, 《Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr》 is a major retrospective surveying his practice from his early career to his final years. The exhibition presents approximately 500 photographs from 14 major series, along with 90 photobooks and video materials, tracing more than five decades of his work. Organized in collaboration with Magnum Photos and the Martin Parr Foundation, it is the first major retrospective of the artist to be held in Asia since his death.

A New Documentary Approach to Everyday Life
 
Martin Parr worked within documentary photography, yet his practice followed a direction distinct from its more familiar conventions. Rather than focusing on public realities such as social conflict, labor, and poverty—subjects central to one major tradition of documentary photography—he turned his attention to holidays, shopping, food, tourism, parties, and sporting events: moments in which nothing conventionally historic appears to happen.
 
For Parr, the ways in which people rest, eat, consume, and travel were not trivial scenes of private life. They were social acts through which the class structures, cultural tastes, desires, and values of a particular period became visible. By observing the destinations people chose, the goods they purchased, and the ways they presented themselves before the camera, he revealed how consumer society shapes personal lifestyles and identities.
 
For Parr, consumption and leisure represented both individual choices and social spaces in which class and taste became visible. In his photographs, everyday life expands beyond the private sphere to become a microcosm of contemporary society, where consumer culture, mass tourism, class, region, globalization, and image culture intersect.

British Society Seen Through Color Photography
 
Martin Parr began his career with black-and-white photography. His photographs of communities and everyday life in northern England during the 1970s possess a relatively calm and lyrical atmosphere, markedly different from the intense color and heightened visual effects of his later work. His practice began to receive wider attention after his transition to color photography in the 1980s.
 
His representative series was photographed between 1983 and 1985 in New Brighton, a seaside resort in northwestern England. In vivid color, Parr recorded families visiting the beach and amusement facilities, parents caring for their children, and people relaxing in surroundings scattered with rubbish.

When first presented, the series generated considerable controversy. Some critics accused Parr of objectifying working-class leisure culture through a cynical and voyeuristic gaze. Others regarded the work as a significant departure from the solemn conventions of traditional black-and-white documentary photography, using color to record the class culture and mass consumption of contemporary Britain in a new visual language.
 
Parr did not idealize the people in his photographs, but neither did he simply ridicule them. Humor and discomfort, familiarity and distance coexist within his images. Viewers may initially laugh at the people depicted, but they also come to recognize that the behaviors and tastes shown are not entirely different from their own.

Landscapes of Consumer Society and Mass Tourism
 
From the 1980s onward, Parr expanded his practice beyond Britain to locations around the world. He visited well-known tourist attractions and holiday resorts, shopping centers and fast-food restaurants, racecourses and museums, international events and social gatherings, recording the ways people experienced consumption and leisure.
 
As globalization progressed, tourist destinations became not only places in which visitors encountered different histories and cultures, but also consumer spaces where similar products and images were repeatedly reproduced. People no longer simply viewed landscapes. They recorded locations through cameras, posed for commemorative photographs, and constructed their travel experiences in the form of images.
 
Parr focused less on the tourist attraction itself than on the behavior of those visiting it. He observed where people looked, what they purchased, and how they posed for photographs. Images taken at geographically distinct locations—including the Acropolis in Athens, the Spanish resort city of Benidorm, and the beaches of Mumbai—reveal cultural differences while also exposing the shared patterns of behavior produced by the global tourism industry.
 
His photographs demonstrate that globalization involves more than the movement of goods and capital. It is also a process through which the ways people experience places, consume, and represent their experiences through images become increasingly similar.

Images in Which Attraction and Discomfort Coexist
 
The most recognizable characteristics of Martin Parr’s photography are its intense color and close-range perspective. He actively used flash and close-up photography to exaggerate the textures of skin, food, clothing, and consumer goods. Sunburned skin, melting ice cream, greasy food, and brightly colored souvenirs appear more vivid and artificial than they do in reality.
 
These images are visually appealing yet simultaneously uncomfortable. Food appears appetizing but excessive, while bright colors communicate both pleasure and fatigue. Rather than morally criticizing consumer society from an external position, Parr brought its desires and pleasures, excesses and contradictions, together within a single frame.
 
His photographs therefore cannot be defined solely as satire or social criticism. Consumption and tourism offer contemporary people pleasure and freedom of movement, while also revealing excess, standardization, and class difference. Parr presents these contradictory realities not through direct explanation, but through visual tension.

A Practice Expanded Through Photobooks
 
Alongside photographic works, the exhibition gives considerable attention to 90 of Martin Parr’s photobooks. For Parr, the photobook was not a secondary record used to organize completed works. It was an independent medium through which multiple images could be arranged and repeated to construct narratives concerning consumption, class, tourism, and globalization.
 
A photograph that appears to be an incidental observation when viewed individually can acquire a more structured social meaning when accumulated and edited within a book. The significance of Parr’s practice emerges not only through a single decisive image but through the repetition and connection of multiple photographs.

Parr was not only a photographer but also a collector and researcher of photobooks. By collecting and introducing publications from different regions and historical periods, he emphasized that the history of photography has been shaped not only through museum exhibitions but also through processes of publishing, editing, and distribution. By presenting photographs and photobooks together, the exhibition demonstrates how his practice expanded from photography into publishing, collecting, and research.
 
 
 
Seoul and Pyongyang Through Martin Parr’s Eyes
 
For Korean audiences, one of the most notable aspects of the exhibition is the inclusion of photographs Parr took on the Korean Peninsula. The exhibition features works made in both South and North Korea, including photographs taken in Pyongyang in 1997 and Seoul in 2004.
 
Rather than treating the two cities solely as political symbols, Parr focused on people’s behavior and the visual landscapes he encountered in streets, public events, tourist sites, and everyday life. He recorded facial expressions, gestures, public spaces, and ordinary scenes rather than relying on official representations of the state.

His photographs of Seoul capture a period when mass consumption, urban lifestyles, and global image culture had become deeply embedded in Korean society following decades of rapid economic development. Viewed alongside his photographs of other global cities, these images reveal how Seoul was also changing within the structures of global consumer culture, tourism, and image production.
 
The photographs taken in Korea are more than records of the country as seen by a foreign photographer. They invite viewers to consider how much the spaces and lifestyles of the period have changed, as well as which behaviors and desires continue to be repeated today.
 
 
 
A Contemporary Archive of the Image Age
 
Martin Parr’s photographs continue to feel familiar because we now inhabit a visual environment similar to the one he observed. Images of food, shopping, travel, and leisure photographed in vivid colors and shared with others are reproduced daily across social media.
 
Smartphones and social media did not exist when Parr began his career, but he recognized early on how people used images to express themselves and construct social identities. Today, people experience travel, dining, and shopping while simultaneously photographing and sharing those experiences. Through images, they show where they are, what they consume, and what kind of lives they lead.

It would be an overstatement to claim that Parr directly anticipated the age of social media. His work does, however, demonstrate that the practice of constructing experiences of consumption and travel through images—and presenting them to others—had already taken shape before the digital era. From this perspective, his photographs extend beyond records of past consumer society to become a visual archive of how images have organized contemporary behavior, desire, and identity over several decades.

《Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr》 demonstrates how ordinary scenes can become records revealing the social structures and desires of an era. Parr’s photographs go beyond satirizing consumption and tourism. Together, they form a portrait of contemporary society, documenting over five decades how modern people live by presenting themselves through images.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition title:《Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr》
Exhibition period: July 16–October 18, 2026
Venue: Photography Seoul Museum of Art
Artist: Martin Parr
Exhibition contents: Approximately 500 photographs, 90 photobooks, and video materials
In collaboration with: Magnum Photos and the Martin Parr Foundation
Admission: Free
Website: https://sema.seoul.go.kr/kr/visit/photosema