Today, photographs with intensely saturated colors and close-up perspectives, encountered daily in advertising, social media, and tourist snapshots, no longer appear unfamiliar to us. The internationally renowned photographer Martin Parr (1952–2025) spent decades persistently photographing ordinary moments of consumption and leisure unfolding within everyday life. The photographs he left behind, shaped by his distinctive humor and keen observation, have become a vast landscape through which we experience contemporary visual culture today.
Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr is the first major retrospective held in Asia following the artist’s passing, commemorating the breadth of his photography. The exhibition presents 14 major series, spanning from his early works to his later years, alongside more than 500 photographs and all 89 photobooks published over the course of his life. The exhibition also includes his photographs of North and South Korea, taken during his visits to the Korean peninsula between the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Parr, a member of Magnum Photos*, an internationally renowned photographic collective, was a photographer who persistently observed everyday life and visual culture in contemporary society over the past several decades. He consistently documented the ways people present themselves through images in tourist destinations, sports stadiums, fast-food restaurants, and lively streets around the world, where leisure and consumption continuously take place in everyday life. In particular, the rise of consumer culture and mass tourism since the 1980s became a defining backdrop to his photographic work. However, his photographs cannot be understood simply as critiques or satires of consumer society. His gaze moves closely into the world of his subjects rather than observing them from a distance. Through exaggerated colors, densely layered compositions, and the artist’s lingering observation on moments that might otherwise pass unnoticed, he invites viewers to see the familiarity of everyday life in unfamiliar ways. The figures within these familiar scenes are not the protagonists of extraordinary events; rather, they are vacationers in sunglasses, shoppers in supermarkets, and ordinary people around us eating, posing, and taking photographs. Within these seemingly unremarkable scenes, Parr sharply captures the desires, tastes, patterns of consumption, and modes of behavior that shape contemporary life. Through his distinctive humor and sharp observation, the contemporary landscape of life shaped by the ways we adorn, document, and remember ourselves through images comes sharply into focus.
In an era when artificial intelligence rapidly produces seamless and uniform images, Parr’s photographs instead draw attention to the materiality and immediacy of the photographic medium itself. He focuses not on refined beauty, but on accidental moments, excessive details of everyday life, and scenes that appear awkward or incomplete. Rather than remaining as documents of a particular era, his photographs continue to raise questions about what we see and how we look within contemporary visual culture. This exhibition approaches Parr’s photography not through a single lens centered on social satire or the critique of consumer culture, but “through the candid and direct way of looking” that he sustained throughout his life. Figures captured at an uncomfortably close range, objects saturated with intense color, and a gaze that lingers on seemingly trivial moments all invite viewers to look again at the everyday scenes they so often overlook. The people in his photographs are not distant others, but reflections of ourselves today, as individuals who consume, enjoy, and present themselves through images. Parr’s photographs observe their subjects while at the same time gently drawing viewers into the scenes themselves. They quietly ask whether we are simply observing those figures, or whether we are already standing within the scene alongside them.
* Magnum Photos is an international photographic collective and photo agency founded in 1947, widely recognized as one of the leading groups to shape the history of modern documentary photography.
