Martin Parr’s Best Books of the Decade

In total contrast to the Henri Matisse’s book exhibition, but keeping to the same theme of books, I went to the National Photographic Archive, Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin. As part of the PhotoIreland Festival, this exhibition is fantastic walking into the space was a bit unusual as one is used to walking into an art exhibition and being confronted with a few large scale pieces but this exhibition consisted of 30 books placed on a ledge running along the wall. But the impact of the exhibition started when you began flicking through the pages of the books.

The exhibition came about when Martin Parr back in 1999 visited the exhibition Fotografía Pública: Photographing in print 1919-1939 in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, ‘he was left breathless, in a time when photography struggled to prove its art status by ever-larger Diasec prints and rigid mounting, here was a show of loose pamphlets, worn out magazine and yellowed photography books. He bought the catalogue, edited by the curator of the exhibition Horacio Fernández, which was a beautiful photobook in itself, and showed it to his friends and colleagues back home as he remembers ‘Many people also saw this, and it became very cult, with people talking about it, so the impact was enormous. This lead Martin Parr and Gerry Badger to work on two volumes of The photobook – A History which is featured in the exhibition.

Three books I was most impressed with were:

Hans Eijelboom Portraits and Camera 1949 - 2009
Museum of photography, Antwerp, 2009. Small size book with a series of self portraits starting with a shot of him as a baby and running snaps of himself as he grows up. Below each passport size photo is a camera advertisement produced in the same year.

Nein, Onkel, Archive of Modern Conflict London 2008

This book is a series of snap shots of Nazi soldiers doing things that we don’t expect to see them doing attending parties, socialising, having a good time, some very humours.

The shocking disconcerting impact of these photos comes with the knowledge of what happened in the concentration camps in Auschwitz.

Simon Roberts, We English
A fantastic big book of aerial perspective of leisure locations of England. Very uplifting, clean summer photographs of places where people congregates but it’s the landscape and location that are the main feature.