Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr

The vivid colors and close-up perspectives we encounter every day in advertising images, on social media, and in tourist snapshots no longer feel unfamiliar. World-renowned photographer Martin Parr (1952–2025) spent decades intently capturing these sensibilities of contemporary visual culture. With his distinctive humor and powers of observation, his photographs form a vast landscape through which we can read our lives and culture—a landscape that continues to live alongside us. 《Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr》, honoring the artist’s legacy, is the first major retrospective in Asia to be held after his death. The exhibition presents 14 series and more than 500 works, from his early work through his later years, alongside all 90 of the photobooks he published. It also includes works about South Korea and North Korea that he photographed during visits to Korea from the late 1990s through the early 2000s.

Martin Parr, who worked as a member of the world-renowned photographers’ collective Magnum Photos*, spent decades intently observing everyday life and visual culture in contemporary society. He consistently documented how people present themselves through images at tourist destinations around the world, where leisure and consumption take place, as well as at sports stadiums, fast-food restaurants, and lively streets. In particular, the consumer culture and mass tourism that expanded from the 1980s onward provided an important backdrop for his work. His photographs cannot be fully understood simply as critiques or satires of consumer society. Rather than keeping his distance from his subjects, he moves closer to their world. His saturated colors, densely composed frames, and attention to moments we might otherwise pass by make us see familiar everyday life in a new way. The people in this familiar world are not protagonists in extraordinary events. They are people enjoying a vacation in sunglasses, shoppers at a supermarket, or ordinary neighbors around us eating or taking pictures. In seemingly insignificant scenes, Martin Parr sharply captures the desires, tastes, consumption, and behaviors of our time. Through his distinctive, humorous observations, the landscape of lives in which we adorn ourselves, document ourselves, and create memories through images finally comes into focus.

In an era when artificial intelligence can quickly produce polished, uniform images, his photographs instead remind us of the materiality and immediacy of photography as a medium. He focuses not on refined beauty, but on chance moments, the overflowing scenes of everyday life, and awkward, imperfect situations. His photographs therefore do more than document a particular era: they prompt us to reconsider what we see and how we look within contemporary visual culture. This exhibition follows the “way of seeing that faces things honestly and directly” that Martin Parr upheld throughout his career. Rather than confining his photographs to a specific message, it draws attention to the gaze itself, which playfully expands through deep identification with its subjects. The people captured at an uncomfortably close distance and the objects surrounded by vivid color overlap with our own image today: we consume and enjoy, constantly presenting ourselves through images. And the exhibition asks: Are we looking at them, or are we already standing together with them in that scene?

*Founded in 1947, Magnum Photos is an international group of photographers and a photo agency, and one of the leading collectives to have shaped the course of modern documentary photography.