Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr

The intense colors and close-up perspectives we encounter daily in advertising images, social media, and travel snapshots are no longer unfamiliar. World-renowned photographer Martin Parr (1952–2025) has relentlessly captured the sensibilities of this contemporary visual culture for decades. The photographs he left behind, marked by his unique humor and observational skills, have become a vast landscape for reading our lives and culture, breathing alongside us.

Honoring the artist's legacy, 《Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr》 is the first large-scale retrospective in Asia held after the artist's passing. This exhibition presents 14 series and over 500 works ranging from his early projects to his final years, while also introducing a total of 90 photobooks he published. In particular, works related to South and North Korea, captured during his visits from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, can also be encountered here.

As a member of the world-renowned photography group Magnum Photos*, Martin Parr is a photographer who has most persistently observed the daily life and visual culture of modern society over the past several decades. He has steadily recorded the ways people reveal themselves through images at tourist destinations, sports stadiums, fast-food restaurants, and vibrant streets across the globe where leisure and consumption take place.

In particular, the landscapes of consumer culture and mass tourism that expanded since the 1980s served as an important backdrop for his work. It is not enough to understand his photographs simply as images that criticize or satirize consumer society. Rather than keeping a distance from his subjects, his gaze moves closer into that world.

The exaggerated colors, high-density frames, and the artist's gaze lingering on moments that might otherwise be overlooked make us view familiar daily life as something strange. The figures in this friendly world are not protagonists of special events. They are people enjoying vacations in sunglasses, shoppers at supermarkets, or ordinary neighbors around us eating food or taking photos.

In such unremarkable scenes, Martin Parr sharply captures the desires, tastes, consumption, and behavioral patterns we possess today. Through his uniquely humorous observations, the landscape of life—where we decorate, record, and remember ourselves through images—is finally revealed clearly.

In an era like today, where artificial intelligence rapidly produces smooth and homogeneous images, his photographs instead remind us of the materiality and presence of photography as a medium. He focuses on accidental moments, overflowing daily landscapes, and scenes that are somewhat awkward and imperfect, rather than refined beauty. Therefore, his photographs do not stop at recording a specific era; they prompt us to question what we see and how we look within contemporary visual culture.

This exhibition seeks to follow the "way of seeing—facing things honestly and head-on" that Martin Parr adhered to for many years. Rather than confining his photographs to a specific message, it focuses on the gaze itself, which blends deeply with the subject and spreads cheerfully. The figures captured from an excessively close distance and the objects filled with intense colors overlap perfectly with our own images today—as beings who consume, enjoy, and constantly reveal themselves through images. And it asks: Are we looking at them, or are we already standing there within the scene?

*Magnum Photos is an international group of photographers and a photo agency founded in 1947, representing a leading collective of photographers who have guided the flow of modern documentary photography.

Source: Seoul Museum of Art website