[Gallery Walk] One Photo Is a Joke, 500 Define an Era

Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Photography 'Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr'

From a child in a shopping cart to crowds of selfie-takers

Fifty years of consumer society documented through humor

Inside a shopping cart, a child is sitting. Among boxes of snacks, toys, and plastic wrappers. It is a scene from a large supermarket in Seoul in 2004. Martin Parr photographed the child, but the longer you look, the more it feels like the objects are surrounding the child. Viewed in isolation, the photo is amusing. But when hundreds of such scenes pile up, the nature of the humor changes. It ceases to be just a joke and becomes a portrait of an era.

Seoul, South Korea, 2004 Martin Parr / Magnum Photos. Seoul Museum of Photography

"Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr," which opened at the Seoul Museum of Photography in Dobong-gu, Seoul on the 16th, is the first major retrospective in Asia to be held since the passing of British photographer Martin Parr (1952-2025) in December last year. Spanning from Parr's black-and-white works in the 1970s to his late works, the exhibition fills the entire museum with 14 photo series featuring over 500 photographs and 90 photobooks. The exhibition is open free of charge through October 18.

While preparations for the exhibition were in full swing during his lifetime, Parr asked curator Hyunjung Son, "Has Korea changed a lot from 30 years ago to now?" As his health declined, his plans to photograph the Han River and Seoul again had to be abandoned. He never made it back, and only his question reached here.

Martin Parr was not a satirist in bright colors from the very beginning. In his early years, he photographed West Yorkshire's chapels and banquet halls, rain-soaked streets in Ireland, and vanishing rural communities, all in black and white. On Dublin's O'Connell Bridge, a pedestrian is shown walking in the rain with a cardboard box over their head. The humor that would become his trademark is already visible, but his camera still maintains some distance. Rather than mocking the decline, these early photographs are closer to an effort to capture disappearing lives before they are gone forever.

On the 15th, attendees are viewing the series "The Cost of Life" at the press conference for the first large-scale retrospective in Asia of modern documentary photography master Martin Parr, titled "Martin Parr: We Are Martin Parr," held at the Seoul Museum of Photography in Dobong-gu, Seoul. Photo by Yonhap News Agency

The transformation came in the early 1980s. Inspired by the brilliant colors of American photographers William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, as well as postcard photographer John Hinde, Parr began to use color film and flash, taking his camera to the beach at New Brighton, England. Trash, rusted railings, children spilling ice cream, and vacationing families all crowded the frame at once. The result was "The Last Resort" (1983-1985). He was both praised for portraying the tired leisure of the working class during the Thatcher era rather than the romance of vacations, and criticized for turning the poor into subjects for spectacle.

This debate continued even at Magnum Photos. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who valued black-and-white photography and humanism, felt that he and Parr belonged to different worlds. Parr's admission sparked one of the most heated debates in Magnum's history; it was only in 1988 that he became an associate member and in 1994 a full member. Parr changed more than just the subject matter of photographs. He demonstrated that supermarkets, beaches, parties, and food—rather than only war and revolution—could also serve as powerful records of society.

New Brighton, England, 1983-85 Martin Parr / Magnum Photos. Seoul Museum of Photography

Although he could not swim, he spent his life photographing beaches. His parents were avid birdwatchers, and Parr himself was said to resemble a bumbling birdwatcher more than a celebrated photographer. As people failed to recognize him as a great photographer, he waited for the least remarkable expressions: the moment someone opens their mouth to chew; the moment tourists face away from landmarks to take standard photos; the moment a bored couple gazes in different directions.

This is also when the exhibition becomes most convincing—not with a single image, but when a mass of photos converges. In "Small World," tourists strike remarkably similar poses in front of the Acropolis, the Pyramids, and the Alps, differing only in nationality. In "Common Sense," about 270 images of hamburgers, cakes, suntanned skin, teeth, and souvenirs are packed into a dense grid. Seen individually, they are visual jokes. Seen in repetition, they become an anthropological catalogue of consumer bodies and goods. It's a habit of our time: explaining ourselves by what we buy and prioritizing the photos we take at a place over simply having visited it.

Of course, a large scale of over 500 images is not always a virtue. It can cause visitors to rush from one laugh to the next, flattening images from different times and places into a single commodity labeled "a Martin Parr photograph." The exhibition regains its power in the slower pace of his early black-and-white photographs, the series on North and South Korea, and the photobook browsing space. For Parr, photobooks were not storage boxes for finished images; through the selection and juxtaposition of photographs, he would edit an era as a form of artistic creation. That is why the Tate holds a collection of more than 12,000 of his photobooks gathered over more than 25 years.

Pyongyang, 1997 Martin Parr / Magnum Photos. Seoul Museum of Photography

For Korean viewers, the rooms for "North Korea" and "South Korea" are the most uncomfortable and intriguing. In 1997, he entered Pyongyang on a package tour, photographing statues, the Juche Tower, markets, and children. "It felt like a giant movie set," he remarked. From the following year until 2007, he visited Namdaemun Market, hypermarkets, Everland, and Jeju Island. In Pyongyang, he photographed the backdrops curated by the state; in Seoul, the scenes overflowing with market-driven abundance. One wall is filled with monuments, the other with snack packets and toys. Different systems, but everywhere people stand before images that were created for them in advance.

The title of the posthumous retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris this year was "Global Warning." Critics saw the long-standing jokes about tourism and consumption in his work darkening into warnings about environmental destruction and inequality. In Seoul, the title chosen is "We Are Martin Parr." We are not outsiders being warned; we are the ones repeating the behaviors found in his photographs. Parr was not an ascetic denouncing consumer society from the outside. He, too, was a tourist, a consumer, an obsessive collector of cameras, photobooks, and souvenirs. His photographs refuse to end in simple ridicule because he never left himself in a safe zone.

The child in the 2004 shopping cart would likely be an adult by now. If Martin Parr had returned to Seoul, what might he have photographed? Perhaps it would be people staring at their phones in front of the checkout counters, people taking photos of food before eating, or people waiting in line just to snap a picture.

He never made it back. Instead, only the next scene he would have photographed continues outside the exhibition hall.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.