Martin Parr. Ironia & Amore: istruzioni per una vita felice

Manchester, Hebden Bridge, and the decision to use colour

Parr was born in Epsom, Surrey, on 23 May 1952, and studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970 to 1973, in a cohort that also contained Daniel Meadows and Brian Griffin. In 1975 he moved to Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire and worked for several years in black and white on the chapels, fairs and small civic rituals of the Calder Valley. That material produced his first books: Bad Weather in 1982, then Calderdale Photographs and A Fair Day, both in 1984, the last drawn from his work in Ireland.

The break came in 1982, while he was living in Wallasey on the Wirral, when he gave up black and white for colour. Between 1983 and 1985 he photographed the faded resort of New Brighton on a Plaubel Makina 67, firing flash in daylight so that ice cream, sunburn and litter all came back at the same brightness. The pictures were published in 1986 as The Last Resort and shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and they are generally credited with pushing British documentary photography out of monochrome and into colour. Forty years later the camera itself is a museum object: it went on display at his own foundation in February 2026.

The subjects he kept going back to

After New Brighton he turned the same method on the people he came from. The Cost of Living, in 1989, photographed middle-class leisure and acquisition. Signs of the Times followed in 1992, made alongside a BBC television series about domestic taste. Small World, in 1995, took the method abroad and became the standard reference point for photography about mass tourism: the queue at the viewing platform, the coach party, the monument reduced to a backdrop.

Common Sense, in 1999, was the largest of these projects. It looked at global consumption through close-up, high-flash detail, and was launched as a simultaneous worldwide exhibition of 350 images. Life's a Beach, published in 2012, gathered three decades of his sunbathers into a single body of work. Across his career he produced roughly sixty solo photobooks, with the broader count of titles he made, edited or compiled put at more than a hundred, and he collected photobooks as seriously as he made them.

His own account of the work was consistent and unfussy. He described making serious photographs disguised as entertainment, said there was something very interesting about being boring, and told the Jeu de Paume that he was not trying to convince anyone but simply showing people what they already thought they knew.

Magnum, and a foundation in Bristol

Parr became an associate of Magnum Photos in 1988 and a full member in 1994, on a narrow vote — his colour satire sat awkwardly next to the agency's documentary tradition, and the argument about whether he belonged there was conducted inside the co-operative itself. He went on to serve as its president from 2013 to 2017.

Institutional recognition arrived steadily rather than early: a retrospective at the Barbican Arts Centre in 2002, and a CBE in the 2021 Birthday Honours. He set up the Martin Parr Foundation in 2014 and opened its premises at Paintworks in Bristol in October 2017, built around his own archive and a growing collection of British and Irish photography that now includes more than 12,000 photobooks alongside prints and papers. The foundation also runs a gallery and supports photographers at the start of their careers, which was the point of it.

6 December 2025, and the year that followed

Parr died in Bristol on 6 December 2025, aged 73, of myeloma, which had been diagnosed in May 2021. He had worked almost until the end, and had put a long-term plan in place for the foundation so that its programme would carry on.

It did, after a pause: the Bristol gallery closed through January 2026 and reopened with The Last Resort 40 Years On, which ran from 20 February to 24 May 2026 and showed the complete 1986 sequence together with contact sheets, period ephemera, pictures left out of the book, and the Plaubel Makina 67 he shot it on. The foundation's director, Jenni Smith, said the show let them mark his death while celebrating the career, and the exhibition that had been scheduled for the spring, Dark Tales, was moved to the autumn slot, running from 17 September to 20 December 2026. Both shows coincided with the 40th anniversary of the New Brighton book.

Paris, and the last show he had a hand in

The major retrospective of his work opened in Paris eight weeks after he died. Global Warning ran at the Jeu de Paume from 30 January to 24 May 2026, curated by Quentin Bajac with Parr himself and Clémentine de la Féronnière, with around 180 works across five thematic sections covering fifty years and five continents, and a catalogue from Phaidon.

The framing was Parr's own: he had concluded that almost everything he had photographed — the flights, the cars, the packaging, the crowded sand — was connected to climate change by implication rather than by subject, and the title followed from that. The hang began on the beaches, treated less as holiday scenes than as engineered spaces producing waste. French critics reading it after his death used it to argue against the long-standing charge of cynicism: the attention in the pictures turned out to be closer to affection than contempt. That is the argument the Milan show now picks up and makes explicitly.

Milan: seventy prints on Via Varesina

Martin Parr. Ironia & Amore: istruzioni per una vita felice runs at Spazio Varesina 204, in the Milano Certosa District, from 15 October 2026 to 28 February 2027. It is curated by Arianna Rinaldo and built from seventy photographs covering more than thirty years, from the late twentieth century into the 2000s. The route is organised by subject rather than chronology: everyday scenes, leisure, mass tourism, the private business of couples and families, and a set of self-portraits in which Parr walks into his own frame. Among the images released ahead of the opening is a Miami beach picture from 1998, from the Life's a Beach material.

The premise is stated plainly in the curatorial text — that behind the colour and the eccentricity there are two constants, appetite for life and lightness towards other people — and that Parr looked at the world with humour and involvement but without passing sentence on anyone. It is a reading of him rather than a survey of him, and at seventy prints it is a selection, not a retrospective.

This is Parr's second Milan exhibition in recent years. Short & Sweet, at the Mudec in 2024, was chosen by Parr himself with Magnum Photos and ran to more than two hundred prints, including a large block from Common Sense and a previously unpublished interview with the critic Roberta Valtorta. The Varesina 204 show is a quarter of that size and takes the opposite approach: fewer pictures, one argument. A press preview was held on 14 October 2026 with Rinaldo, Margherita Guerra of YourPictureditor and Chiara Spinnato of Monstrum.