The retrospective devoted to Martin Parr at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie is an opportunity to look back over the entire career of a photographer whose images have invaded the art world in recent years. This omnipresence, a sign of his prolific work, extends beyond the simple framework of photographic exhibitions: artistic director of the previous Rencontres photographiques d'Arles, author of some thirty books, Martin Parr is also regularly invited to show his collections. In the fragmented setting of the MEP, it is therefore possible to see the black and white prints of the early years in the basement and on the mezzanine floor, followed by the colour images to which the Englishman owes his fame on the whole of the first floor. Two installations, a film and a video game complete the exhibition, which, against a backdrop of pastel blue and apple green picture rails, offers a complete panorama of a career that began in the early 1970s.

From the outset, his work oscillated between an initially humanistic documentary vein and a conceptual practice, of which the game ‘Love Cubes’ (1972) and the installation ‘Home Sweet Home’ (1974) are the first examples. Very soon, however, Martin Parr began to detach himself from the melancholy evident in the images documenting the disappearance of traditional English society, injecting his work with a ferocious sense of humour that set him apart from the group of photographers with whom he was working at the time. At the same time, he refocused his attention on subjects that expressed, almost caricaturally, a certain idea of England. Part of Parr's work was devoted to a fascinated appropriation of England's national heritage: the bad weather in the Bad Weather series (1982), British decorative habits in Signs of the Times (1992), and his film Think of England, whose leitmotif is reduced to the question "What is it to be English?

Continuing his documentary work, he abandoned black and white for colour at the turn of the 1980s with the Point of Sale series, which looked at the establishment of consumer society. But it was once again a change of technique that led Martin Parr to the images that made him famous. Abandoning 135mm film in favour of a medium-format camera with a flash mounted around the lens, he produced a work on a decrepit seaside resort entitled The Last Resort (1983-1986), whose detailed, garish images were to become his trademark. From this point onwards, Parr's images relied almost exclusively on two recurring effects due to this change in the way he shot: on the one hand, the “fill-in” technique, which gives these photographs saturated colours without cast shadows thanks to a balance between natural and artificial light; on the other, the freezing effect of the flash, which shows Parr's interest in the intermediate phases of facial expressions. For Parr, the face is often a zone subject to every possible expressive slip of the tongue, which the photographer uses and abuses to force the narrative of his images, as in the series One Day Trip (1988).

The rest of the exhibition shows the internationalisation of the photographer's career, with the extension of his subjects outside the UK and his entry into the Magnum agency. In the light of this exhibition, it would be interesting to note the extent to which Martin Parr's photographs function according to the idea of the commonplace. If only in the two installations where the photographer creates environments in order to associate the public even more closely with his fascination for the vernacular. The same public that most of the time smiles in complicity at images that function in the mode of the cliché, for better or worse.

In the less inspired works, there is a tautological effect of the stereotype that immediately blocks any discourse. In the series of photographs entitled Small World (1987-1994), a tourist is a tourist, and this observation leads to no further awareness of the consequences of a globalised leisure industry. Similarly, in his series The Cost of Living (1986-1989), Parr is usually content to freeze in his shots an English middle class with whom he never ceases to claim that he has common cause. This empathy for the middle class is also reflected in the image the photographer portrays of himself in his portraits: an average guy whose very interesting collection of books on photography and his album on the town of Boring, located in the same room, obviously do not encourage us to take him at face value.

[1] Quéré Henri, ‘Le cliché : pour ou contre’. In MATHIS, Gilles. (collected by). Le cliché , Toulouse: PUM Coll. ‘Interlangues’, 1998: 107

Because it's clear that this use of stereotypes can also turn the viewer's knowing smile into a grimace. In series such as The Last Resort and Common Sense (1995-1999), it is precisely because the images are commonplace - literally ‘belonging to and concerning the majority’ - that they create a sense of unease. As Henri Quéré puts it: "Given as if in advance, the cliché, in a sense, teaches us nothing about itself or anything else. At the same time, it represents a fine example of the paradox of communication, since close to zero information, it can give rise to optimal communication [1]. It is perhaps this renewed capacity to convey through images that Martin Parr uses to affirm the possibility of contemporary photojournalism. Whatever the case, this is yet another piece of evidence to add to the controversy surrounding Martin Parr's entry into the Magnum agency in 1988. This debate was an opportunity to highlight the antagonisms between a humanist school of photojournalism, represented by Henri Cartier-Bresson, where it is necessary to choose sides in order to bear witness, and contemporary photojournalism, where the author's vision and strategies take precedence over the subject.