It’s all going off in Cardiff, Photography wise that is. The Third Floor Gallery is opening in Cardiff with a new show by Peter Dench titled Love UK. The show is an exploration of what love is in the UK. I am sure its going to be a killer show you just need to check out some of his work to realize that.
The show opens at 7pm on February 12th and is on show till the 7th of march.
Martin Parr is also opening a show in Cardiff at the same time. Martins new body of work “Working Men’s Clubs” will be on show at the Earlswood Working Men’s Club until March the 14th. You can find out more about this new body of work at Martin Parr’s Blog.
Above image by Martin Parr.
I was invited to go to both openings they just happened to be on two consecutive nights so it would have been a perfect excuse to take a trip to Wales but unfortunately I could not make it because of other commitments! If you live in that neck of the woods you need to spend the day in Cardiff and check out both these shows.
I recently got a photograph published “Joachim Schmid Is Martin Parr – Martin Parr Is Joachim Schmid”. It’s an interesting little book project where Joachim Schmid went to the Berlin Art Forum with Martin Parr’s pass and took photos in Parr’s style. The second half of the book are photos picked from the Martin Parr WE ♥ U picked by Parr him self. The resulting book is great selection of photographs that could of been shot by Parr himself.
You can preview the entire book and buy it from blurb.com here.
The photo of mine that is published in there is one of my snowy swimmer pics from 2007. You can see more of my snowy swimmer pictures in my snowy swimmers flickr set, seeing as there was a lot of snow in the past month I have added quite a bit to that set lately.
I just received my invite to the private view of Parr World in Newcastle (UK). Parr world is an exhibition in 3 parts, A large part of the show is not photography but a range different of objects collected but Martin Parr. On the Photography side of things there are 150 photographs by other photographers from Parr’s private collection. Parr also has his own photographs on show from his new body of work Luxury. If you want to know more about the show I wrote a review of the Paris show here. Unfortunately I can’t make the private view because I will be in San Francisco in October spreading the word of lomokev (more details here). To anyone in England I would say this is a must see show and you should make the pilgrimage to go see it. I have scene the show in Münich and Paris and it was well worth the journey.
Parr World is at the Baltic center between the 16th October and 17th January 2010. You can find more details on the Baltic centers site here.
We all went along to hear Martin Parr speak at the South Bank center on Tuesday night. Before the talk we had some time to kill so we went for a little wonder along the Thames. I discovered the Snapshot Photobooth on Queens Walk (opposite Royal Festival Hall). It’s a flickr linked photo booth that uploads images as soon as it’s taken them (bit like my bike but not as cool). I think this shot is a fitting tribute to Martian parr’s Autoportrait work.
My wife and I have just taken a trip to paris to see Martin Parr’s show “Planéte Parr” after the man himself invited us to the opening night. It is the same show that was in Münich and the Netherlands under the name of Parr World with some new additions. The show consists of 3 parts: Luxury, Parr’s collections and the prints by other photographers from Parr’s private collection.
Luxury is Parr’s new work documenting the lifestyle of the super rich, to the oligarchs of Russia to the races in Bahrain. It is a natural progression from his work documenting the the lower class families in his “Last Resort” to the documentation of of the middle classes in “Think of England”.
Parr’s collections of objects and ephemera, It’s really amazing to think that everything has been collected by one man and not a team at a museum. The objects on show range from collections of tea trays and postcards to collectables with the images of Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama and Saddam Hussein on them. These include Saddam watches, a pair of Obama flip-flops and Thatcher a tea pot.
There is a large collection of work from other photographers on a wide range of subjects. This includes Elaine Constantine’s photos of Mosh pits in the 90’s to Chris Killip’s Work Documenting the effects of thatcherism in the 70’s. The most thought provoking was Paul Seawright work documenting the sites of sectarian murders in Belfast juxtaposed with headlines describing the crimes that took place. In stark contrast to Paul Seawright’s work is Keith Armatts photographs of the passive aggressive post-it notes from his wife. It would be worth going to the show just see this diverse collection of images.
There is also a selection of prints form The Guardian Cities Project in which Brighton, my home town, was one. It was quite nice to see a photo of my friend Dave on the wall of a big Parisian art gallery going for his morning swim.
Parr World will be coming to Newcastle in October to the Caltic Center for Contemporary Arts. I have seen the shows in Paris and Munich and defiantly will be making my way up north to in October, if it’s your part of the world you should too.
Planéte Parr is on until the 27 September 2009
more info: www.jeudepaume.org
As an added bonus Martin had a second private view the next day in Paris showing his “Playas” work, this is a new body of work documenting the beach culture of Latin America. He has put this work into a book which is far from technically perfect, the color reproduction terrible, the typography is appalling and I love it. I was lucky to get 2 copies one with out any cyan on the cover. Martian said to me “I bet you are at a point in your career where you want your books to be perfect” he then went on to explain that he is at a point in his career where he has gone the other way. For his Playas book he sourced a mexican designer and let them go to town on the layout of the book, the designers placed graphics over images which would horrify most photographers! It was printed in a really cheep printers in mexico, on a lot of the books the CMYK dose not even align!
If you are a flickr user and are into Parr’s work you should join the flickr group I started: Martin Parr WE LOVE U. It was because of this group that I first started a correspondence with Martian Parr.
