Souvenir. Martin Parr, Photography and Collecting

Parr’s professional practice goes beyond the strict context of his photographic work due to his technical and poetic approach, and his activity as a collector.

The show examines whether Parr’s photography seeks to intervene in reality at an analytical level or whether it consists in recording percussive images that are in general shocking, grotesque or outright kitsch, with a purely illustrative or aesthetic end.

The aim is to link photography and collecting in terms of their shared creative choice-appropriation, an act to which much contemporary artistic thinking has entrusted the creative-artistic phenomenon. The idea is to establish a dialogue between two realities (photography and collecting) that reveals their affinities and contradictions, and allows the spectator to decipher the motives, means and objectives of these two forms of artistic intervention.

The exhibition brings together two collections, by Martin Parr and Juanjo Fuentes, and sets out to decipher the aesthetic, rhetorical and ideological keys of Parr’s body of work, at the same time analyzing new forms of collecting that, from a traditional viewpoint, compromise the status and the very notion of what is artistic. Both collections are generated by compulsive collecting and mass results.