Martin Parr

Martin Parr: Global Warning brings together more than five decades of sharp observation and visual wit in a publication that feels uncannily attuned to the present moment. Long known for his unmistakable eye and saturated color palette, Parr has built a body of work that scrutinizes everyday life with equal parts affection and critique, revealing how ordinary behaviors quietly mirror global anxieties.

From his early black-and-white photographs made in modest English holiday camps and provincial supermarkets to his later color images of crowded beaches, souvenir stalls, and iconic landmarks, Parr has consistently examined the rituals of leisure and consumption. What might first appear humorous or trivial often carries a deeper unease. Sunburnt tourists, overflowing plates, and compulsive image-making become signs of excess, disconnection, and a world struggling to reconcile pleasure with consequence.

Global Warning reframes Parr’s archive through the lens of contemporary disorder. His photographs speak to climate stress, technological dependency, and the uneasy relationship between humans and animals, without ever resorting to overt moralizing. Instead, meaning emerges through accumulation and contrast. The repetition of gestures, poses, and settings across continents suggests a shared global culture, one that is both strangely unified and profoundly unsustainable.

Published alongside a major exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the book benefits from a thoughtful curatorial approach that situates Parr’s work within broader social, geographic, and ecological debates. Essays by specialists from diverse disciplines expand the reading of the images, showing how Parr’s photographs intersect with issues of urban planning, tourism, wildlife preservation, and social behavior. These texts reinforce the idea that Parr is not merely a satirist, but a meticulous chronicler of his time.

Richly illustrated and carefully edited, Global Warning balances iconic photographs with lesser-known images, inviting readers to reconsider familiar scenes through fresh connections. The result is a portrait of a world teetering between amusement and alarm, where laughter and discomfort coexist. Parr’s enduring achievement lies in his ability to make us look closely at ourselves, and to recognize that the absurdities he captures are not exceptions, but reflections of how we live now.

First published in 1996, 'Small World' is one of the most popular and most important of Martin Parr's books. This revised and extended edition includes more than 40 new photographs as well as featuring many of Martin Parr's most iconic images. It is a biting, very funny satire in which Parr looks at tourism worldwide, exposing the increasingly homogenous global culture where in the search for different cultures those same cultures are destroyed.

The issues that Parr raised two decades ago when the book was first published are even more relevant today. Whilst Parr's larger-than-life troupe of tourists appear willing participants in an omnipresent consumer culture they are also bemused victims at the mercy of larger social forces and locked into their insatiable craving for spectacle. Small World's citizens become a symbol of western society s prosperous freedoms, declaring their power and their rights to travel, to choose and to consume.

Following on the heels of Martin Parr's limited-edition, album-style publication Life's a Beach, Aperture now presents this beach-friendly mini edition. Parr has been photographing the topic of the beach for many decades, documenting sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge and the eternal sandy picnic.

His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the publication of The Last Resort (1986), which depicted the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool. What is perhaps less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches around the world. This compilation, his first on the topic, presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and of course, the U.K. The compilation brings to the forefront Parr's engagement with a cherished subject matter--that rare public space in which general absurdities and local quirks seamlessly fuse together.

This book shows Parr at his best, startling us with moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in rituals and traditions associated with beach life the world over.

A new edition of a modern classic of photography. Martin Parr is Europe's premier contemporary photographer, and The Last Resort is the book that is considered to have launched his career.

Taken at the height of the Thatcher years, it depicts the "great British seaside" in all its garish glory. Described by some as cruel and voyeuristic and by others as a stunning satire on the state of Britain, early editions are now much sought after by collectors worldwide. Includes a new essay by Gerry Badger, photographer, architect, curator, and critic.