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The dirty hands of a child holding a doughnut. British socialite ladies serving tea from the foreground. Working class girl in an ice cream parlour looking earnestly at the camera, while children eagerly await their ice cream. A group of people eating unabashedly at a wedding. The focus on detail. Creating fiction out of reality.
With a distinctive approach and a critical yet ironic gaze, Martin Parr is known for documenting the everyday life of the middle and working classes, for the most part, as no one has ever done before. The photographer not only captures the image, but also its social background amidst a critique of contemporary consumerism, which he also evokes on many occasions through food.
Within Parr’s eclectic universe, and his bright, sharp, saturated photographs, are hidden realities full of irony, reflected in dishes captured with flashes that enhance their vividness, creating a sense of artificiality. Through this aesthetic but raw vision with which he relativises the earthly world, the photographer documents the notion that we are what we eat, practically since he began to capture reality in the 1970s, as a portrait of time, of eras, and of how consumer society has shaped our lives. When consumerism loses control’, as he expresses in the documentary “I Am Martin Parr”.
REAL FOOD
Parr’s obsession with photography is also experienced with food, which has long been one of his favourite subjects, immortalised in large quantities in a dedicated photobook entitled ‘Real Food’. The work covers decades of his career, from the early 1990s to the date of publication in 2016.
In the book, the artist compiles photographs captured on his travels around the world, reflecting an eclectic mix of his iconicity: a kaleidoscope of food from different cultures, of great feasts of hot dogs, sticky buns or langoustines. It is a collection of close-ups of food, in its mythical garish colour, reflecting Parr’s fascination with the social aspect of food.
Beyond the book, the British artist dilutes his work with a critique of the rise of supermarkets through photos of products that look totally different from what is actually inside them; ‘showing the lie we are being told alongside another of the themes he subtly introduces: a critique of the greed for consumable products as part of what is responsible for global warming.
In this sense, all his images seem to amuse us, but at the same time generate a certain discomfort as we uncompromisingly recognise ourselves as part of the consumerist society as part of Parr’s singular vision of the world with which he has revolutionised contemporary photography.
