Humorist of the everyday: a European traveling show surveys British photographer Martin Parr's work since 1972, in which ordinary people find their pleasures, define their communities and endure what they must

Art in America, March, 2004 by Janet Koplos

Among more recent works, the 1996-2000 "Flower" series of big color images is given an arty turn by having enormous foreground blossoms and blurry backgrounds such as a swimming pool or garage. Flowers are again Parr's subject in "Cherry Blossom Time in Tokyo" (2000), six views of artificial flowers at gas stations, along shopping streets, on home appliance displays and atop a stack of Spam cans in a supermarket. Also from the East is his "Japonais Endormis" series (1998), odd views looking down upon the bangs, brows and bald heads of people sleeping on the subway.

The exhibition includes a wall of images from Parr's Common Sense, a 1999 project of color photocopy images butted together in a grid (stacked nine high and 17 wide at the Kunsthal) that he showed simultaneously in 40 locations, including Janet Borden Gallery. The subjects are fragmentary and quirky in what by now seems Parr for the course. A rotting apple, a young woman's nametag on her low-cut dress, an ashtray full of butts, a hairy sunburned chest with a cross pendant--images that Val Williams, writing in the excellent, considered book that accompanies the exhibition, calls "a dictionary of the '90s."

The selections and the observations are the point in Parr's work. One hardly notices details of tone or flaming. He has cut a cross-section through humanity, starting with the local and specific and expanding to scenes of ordinary behavior that seem trim to almost any place in the developed world--this enlargement possibly a consequence of his travel for commercial work as a Magnum photographer since the late '80s. Parr's work has not been without its critics, especially his earlier series, which some saw as taking advantage of essentially innocent subjects or, in a few cases, as exposing people to ridicule. But this exhibition suggests that he looks at people of all types as they are, doing what they believe is the best they can. What he captures is simultaneously touching and funny.

"Martin Parr; Photographic Works 1971-2000" was organized by the Barbican Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, with the support of Magnum Photos. It opened at the Barbican [Jan. 31-April 14, 2002] and traveled to the National Museum, Bradford [Oct. 4, 2002-Jan. 12, 2003], the Museum of Photography, Copenhagen [Feb. 5-Apr. 19, 2003], the Kunsthal Rotterdam [June 5-Aug. 31, 2003] and the Reina Sofia, Madrid [Sept. 23-Dec. 8. 2003]. It will be shown at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris [June-September 2005]. The exhibition is accompanied by a 354-page book by Val Williams, published by Phaidon in London in 2002, along with a boxed set of 45 postcards by Parr.