“You can learn a lot about a country by looking at its beaches: across cultures, the beach is that rare public space in which all absurdities and quirky national behaviors can be found.”
Martin Parr
Compulsive collector of objects and images, since his series The Last Resort(1986) Martin Parr has focused his lens on beaches, starting with the British tradition of beach-going (New Brighton). “The world performs on beaches,” he declares; it is a site of sociability and commerce, and the photographer’s hunting ground for global human behaviors.
Life’s a Beach, a double-entendre title of a series of 60 photographs, seems to be saying that, while our lifestyles are becoming standardized, the beach is perhaps the last outpost where one can be oneself—a truth one rediscovers with equal pleasure from Japan to India, passing through Brazil, Crimea, and Spain. A new series of 20 photographs, taken during a summer residency, combines vernacular photography and its penchant for detail with a new playground—Evian, a seaside resort with old-fashioned charm. Here, mass tourism confronts a disappearing world of good taste and elegance. Emblematic places: the shores of Lake Geneva under the sign of the swan; a five o’clock walk along the cliff with a rather Proustian heroine; luxury hotels for the fortunate few (Hôtel Splendide, Royal, Hôtel Ermitage); or the Cachat Spring with its rejuvenating waters where every spa visitor goes to meditate or to stock up; but also more banal scenes snapped at the market or at the bottling plant. The narrative yields “Spa” or the “Golf course,” where one encounters the idle rich of the Luxury series, now in the autumn of their lives; a family facing Lake Geneva who raise the question of the onlooker in the history of painting (Caspar Friedrich), even if their bag and clothing give away their globalized attributes; the portrait of a woman and her dog, worthy of the golden-age tradition of portraiture; a chamber maid from the Cygnes Hotel who poses in front of clutter straight from a Vanitas; or yet those Lake bathers inscribed in a very Matissean bacchanalia. And, last but not least, “Stella,” the blacktop starlet, hitchhiker with the looks of the warrior goddess Athena who stands up and raises her thumb in the direction of Thonon les Bains, another famous resort.
Exhibited at the Palais Lumière, a jewel of Belle Epoque architecture and today a world-class exhibition center, the two series resonate in a décor of man-made beach, a mirror in the mirror of a comedia dell’arte, both tender and cruel, ironic and scathing.
– Marie-Elisabeth de La Fresnaye
EXHIBITION
Life’s a Beach
Evian sous l’œil de Martin Parr
Du 2 octobre 2015 au 10 janvier 2016
From October 2nd to January 10, 2016
Curator : William Saadé
Galerie Ô
2, rue Nationale
74500 Evian
France
http://ville-evian.fr
http://www.martinparr.com
