Saturated colours, biting irony and keen attention to detail: with "Global Warning", the Jeu de Paume brings together Martin Parr's most iconic images to question our contemporary lifestyles.
Martin Parr passed away on December 6, 2025, at the age of 73, at his home in Bristol. With him disappears much more than a photographer: a way of seeing the world, at once relentless, ironic, and profoundly human, attentive to both mundane rituals and the excesses of modernity. The exhibition "Martin Parr. Global Warning," presented at the Jeu de Paume, highlights this critical perspective on our contemporary failings through various series spanning more than fifty years of work.
Parr never photographed the powerful or the great dramas of history. He chose to focus on what we consider insignificant: standardized holidays, mass tourism, popular leisure activities, everyday consumption, the repetitive gestures of a world saturated with images. But in this banality, he revealed profound tensions—social, cultural, environmental—which, in retrospect, take on a new gravity.
Since the late 1970s, the photographer's work has constituted a methodical inventory of contemporary imbalances. From British seaside resorts to overcrowded beaches around the globe, from supermarkets to shopping malls, Parr relentlessly observes the homogenization of behaviors and landscapes. He doesn't denounce directly, never moralizes; he simply shows. And it is precisely this patient accumulation that gives his gaze its critical power.
His break with documentary black and white, his deliberate use of saturated color, direct flash, and tight framing profoundly transformed social photography. With The Last Resort (1983-1985), a series that has become emblematic, establishes a raw aesthetic that embraces the subtle violence of consumer society: crowded bodies, fried food, melting ice cream, concrete, and pale sunlight. Considered vulgar or provocative at the time, these images permanently redefined what documentary photography can – and should – look at.
Martin Parr, New YorkUSA, 1999
The exhibition "Global Warning" offers an even broader perspective on this work. Bringing together some 180 pieces across five sections – "Everything Must Go," "Small Planet," "The Animal Kingdom," and "Technological Addictions" – it highlights recurring themes: consumer frenzy, the ravages of mass tourism, our ambivalent coexistence with animals, and our relationship with machines of all kinds. Martin Parr was never an activist in the traditional sense, but his work documents with relentless precision the excesses of our lifestyles, which contribute significantly to the climate upheavals of the Anthropocene.
His humor, often perceived as light, reveals itself here as profoundly satirical. Heir to a British tradition of bittersweet mockery, Parr uses the cliché only to subvert it, crack it, and expose its absurdity. Tourist postcard, selfie, wildlife photograph, or food photography become the symptoms of a world that looks at itself without always understanding itself.
This perspective is never that of an outside observer. The photographer constantly reminded us that he was part of the world he photographed. A tireless traveler, a lover of beaches (despite not knowing how to swim), aware of his own carbon footprint, he rejected any moral posturing. "We are heading towards disaster, but we are all going there together." he asserted. This unpretentious lucidity gives his images a rare power: they do not point fingers, they expose a system, and our collective involvement.
Today, in an age of smoothed, calibrated, and sanitized images, Martin Parr's passing leaves a clear critical void. His work reminds us that banality is never neutral, that it is the very arena where our habits, excesses, and blind spots play out. "Global Warning" thus appears not only as a major tribute, but also as a mirror held up to our present.
Martin Parr is gone, but his gaze remains in every photograph that dares to look at the ordinary world without judging it, without idealizing it, and without detours.
“Martin Parr. Global Warning »
Jeu de Paume
1, Place de la Concorde, Paris 1er
From January 30 to May 24, 2026
