Martin Parr’s Home and Abroad, a selection of his colour photographs from 1983 to the present, draws on the contemporary idiom of the soap opera to tell a very different story. Not a celebration of personal events but a fable of our times, a cautionary tale about the homogenisation of Western culture towards the end of the twentieth century.

In Parr’s ‘album’, brash colour images of middle class consumers and aimless tourists jostle alongside the chaos and decay of British seaside resorts. In a spirit more akin to an anthropologist sent out to research the ‘tribes’ of modern Europe, Pass addresses questions of class, prejudice and the erosion of social values by focusing his camera on the places and events we encounter every day – the supermarket, high street shops, heritage sites and safari parks. These are subjects which have been traditionally overlooked by social documentary photographers, keen to tackle more ‘worthy’ themes such as international conflict, the homeless and the sufferings of the working class.

In looking back at Parr’s colour work over the past decade, what is striking is the way in which so many of his images have become icons for the eighties, in much the same way as David Bailey’s have for the early sixties. It is the incidental through telling detail of his photographs which have affected the way we now look at the world – the insipid colours of the seaside café in which a crowd of women clamour for hotdogs, overladen supermarket trolleys and middle-class shoppers greedily eyeing expensive goods and the camera-laden tourists and hawkers who invade tourist sites, anxious not to go home without a photograph.

Often decried for his exploitation of his subjects, Parr openly acknowledges that ‘photography is a naturally exploitative and voyeristic medium – rather than trying to hide that fact, I have come to terms with it and accept that is part of what I do’. References to advertising and other forms of commercial photography abound in the hyperreal colour, exaggeration and fill-in flash, which have come to characterise his visual language.

Whilst his lens is fairly unforgiving, the quality which redeems all of Parr’s work is its underlying irony and humour. Bitter-sweet irony and an eye for social nuance is a trait he shares with other British artists, from the late eighteenth century satirists Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gillray to the contemporary filmmaker Mike Leigh. In dissecting the strident vulgarities if contemporary existence, Parr’s aim is no more nor no less than ‘to purify the dialect of the tribe, and urge the mind to afterthought and foresight’ (T.S.Eliot).

All the works in the exhibition now form part of the British Council Collection , available for all to see.

For further information please contact Brett Rogers