silverguide.site –

I didn’t know Martin Parr very well, but the last time I spoke with him, two months before he died in December last year, he told me about his forth coming exhibition at Jeu de Paume. He wasn’t subtle in adding that the Guardian never reviewed his exhibitions. I wonder now if he knew that the exhibition, titled Global Warning, would be his swansong. I wonder whether he knew he’d never get to see it.

Parr was always popular in France. It might be because the French loved his ability to mock the English, but in the end Parr mocked everyone, including himself. When his work was criticised in the UK as classist or sneering, Parr could cross the channel and seek refuge in a nation where no one seemed to read his work that way. The show at Jeu de Paume is set to be the museum’s most visited on record.

Global Warning gives us Parr in all his gluttonous, giddy glory, an attentive, unabashed and unpretentious observer of everyday absurdities. But through clever curatorial nudges, this show also gives us other unexpected sides to Parr, a creeping sense of a doom we are hurtling towards at breakneck speed.

There are no duds in this show. Every picture has a punchline. Printed large, Parr’s deliciously exposed and saturated colours seep into the space. There are plenty of eccentric moments, happenstance incidents Parr never missed: a postcard rack plonked preposterously on the pristine snow of a ski piste, as if skiers might stop mid run and purchase one on impulse. A woman sunbathing topless, face down on a towel laid out carefully behind a huge rusty bulldozer. And so it goes on – an almanac of the things that disrupt the humdrum balance of life.

Few people in the pictures here seem to have clocked that Parr is there. The fact that Parr looked like a “naff birdwatcher”, as his biographer Wendy Jones described him, was his superpower. People were themselves around him.

The exhibition rooms are painted bright Mr Blobby pink and green. All the photographs are rooted in one of Parr’s most famous ongoing subjects – tourism, starting with his earlier photographs of British seaside resorts and moving to the British-dominated orange tans of Benidorm and Magaluf in Spain. It’s funny that Parr, who couldn’t swim, spent so much time at the beach. He sees the seaside as a place where the quest for leisure paradoxically becomes a slog – as the crowds heave and the rubbish piles up.

From the frolics of the seaside pictures, tourism turns darker in a suite of several images taken in Bali and Gambia, where white tourists are photographed with local labourers, the wealth and power gap made clear. There are, unusually, no laughs in these pictures, but something more accusatory. An older white man gets a mani-pedi on a beach in Bali. A white woman riding in the back of a jeep looks impassively at a group of young boys running after the vehicle. There are other interruptions to the playfully ironic tenor Parr usually assumes. Among the pictures of shoppers at malls, jumble sales and luxury boutiques is an image of a man trying out an automatic rifle for size.

Parr looks at all this as a complicit participant. There are pictures here that acknowledge photographers’ role in the creation of desire. In Venice, a woman holds up her camera, struggles with the framing, as several rough-looking pigeons land on her hands and heads. She persists nonetheless. The photographic act, the desire to own a piece of these places, is akin to collecting souvenirs. And Parr positions himself alongside her – he is also the man in the pink shirt at Chichen Itza, the blonde woman getting her snap of Versailles. He’s also one of the tourists in Pisa, all trying to get the same famous shot, pretending to prop up the leaning tower.

Parr, as this show makes clear, was well-travelled but seemed to remain unworldly. He wasn’t changed by what he saw, nor did he try to change it. He just accepted it. These are the qualities that made him such a great photographer, and why this show is so edifyingly consistent and clear.

So where does all this consumption lead? Another picture, taken in the US during the 2016 presidential campaign, shows a doll-like woman clutching a Trump doll: the box says he speaks 17 phrases (clearly he was more eloquent then). Everything becomes product, and simulations of life become equivalent to the real thing. This is our predicament. And the Earth, like the globe-patterned beach ball abandoned on a beach in Benidorm, slowly deflates in the hot sun.