Parr

The incisive vision of Martin Parr made him totally distinctive in the landscape of contemporary art, and many have been trying to paraphrase his vision. His work is a merciless documentary of everyday life. What he points out, by means of lush images, is the over-abundance of details to which we have grown so accustomed that, at a certain moment in time, hard to establish when, we stopped noticing it. Another point of his commentary is to reinforce something already elevated to the level of a statement by Marcel Duchamp, namely that the mundane can have the same artistic value as the "high" and established, and it is as entitled to be documented, and also that there is always more out there than it meets the eye. There is no specific subject that one should focus onto, but rather an overpowering myriad of details, each possibly a full fledged subject in itself, which could easily escape attention, or be seen from a different point of view, should one decide to devote enough concentration.

"Nobody ever has enough", confesses Trimalchio, in Petronius' Satyricon. This is a statement which applies more than ever to mass culture, characterised by the nesting instinct, as well as by overfilled regurgitation and self-sufficiency in its indulgence and sleepiness. Everybody wants more, and this need is bound to be fulfilled at the very moment the thought crossed our mind, without taking into account that the multitude of options is often more likely to be an anxiety-provoking factor instead of a benefit of civilisation. The selection capacity of the modern man has diminished substantially in order to allow space for another hypertrophied organ, that of consumption and rapid elimination. Short-term memory, minimal concentration and ready-made perceptions are the daily fare, and our eyes are larger than the capacity to actually process information. The effect is not prosperity or satisfaction anymore, but a kind of cultural indigestion, ultimately converted into overall indifference to the abundance, and then anxiety and loneliness. History seems not to matter anymore in a century of five-minute celebrity, only as the base for the newly deposited layers of information, whether relevant or not. The monotonously pixilated present, populated by the ready-made images created to satisfy any taste and by things granting a rapid solution to any problem, moves too fast for us to notice the richness of details.

Parr's breakthrough came in the 1980s with a series centred on a British resort, which documents with a astute observance the holiday life of British working class, overweight,