Mexico
The day Martin Parr “departed” with his camera from Great Britain, our view of Mexico changed forever. An international photography celebrity himself, Parr pulled Mexico into the post-modern iconography of global consumer culture. With their touch of banality, irony and ambiguity, his pictures negotiate for themselves a novel status as critical apparatuses of mutual contemplation among “us” and the “other”, “photography” and “meta-photography”.
Photography and the invention of “seeing”… Today we do not “see” the way we did some decades ago. This is an uncontested fact. The visual baggage we carry on our backs conditions our sight. We see the world through inherited eyes. We consult our visual archives' repertory, in order to disseminate meaning. And so do photographers –all of them– regardless of age, time and status. Rather than ineffably de facto statements, photographs today represent the “aftermath” of other photographs. They are rarely, properly speaking, representations of the outer reality, but rather “deictic” depictions of pre-existent representations. They are tools that both “open” and “shut” our eyes.
Andreas Gursky, Spencer Tunick, Martin Parr and others… All of these grand stars of the contemporary photography arena have had their share of Mexico. All of them have exercised a profound influence on the way we envision the imagery of a land in which Northern-American, Latin and indigenous cultures, colour and violence, modernity and past, cohere into an explosive surreal whole. All of them have “reinvented” Mexico, not just in terms of subject but, mostly, in terms of mode of representation. Although, when it comes to the passionate fascination with the populist trivialities of Mexican everyday material culture, Martin Parr has certainly gone further than anyone else. Ironic and subversively bitter, Parr's gaze has well called out to the cultural hybridism of a society where dichotomies collapse: it has, properly speaking, stolen into the heart of Mexican reality, so as to denaturalize and convert it at one and the same time into an “uncanny else” –a particular schizoid tourist artifice.
“Mexico” was released in 2007, following a dozen of books in which Martin Parr had already put his finger into leisure culture and its material and aesthetic derivatives. If the photographer had been at home documenting Britain's decadent beach sets, junk food and bad fashion, his avid passion for the recollection of uncanny iconological banalities was to find its most perfect expression in the plethora of postcards, souvenirs and objects collapsing Mexico's tourist market. Not surprisingly, Parr's close-ups, isolating exhaustively details of both Mexican and American imported modes and all sorts of eccentricities, bring about a holistic, yet not simplistic at all, vision of the surrounding tourist panorama.
These pictures of fried chickens, lollipops, multi-coloured saints and indigenous faces alone, would probably be expected not to do any better than any random picture coming out of the scrapbook of any sun-burnt British tourist, keen on encountering a pub on his way. Still, they certainly stand pretty well together in the sequence and the juxtaposition of formal elements as established in the book. Half-way between the colour of the American south (New Mexico, Texas and Eggleston are not so far away) and an irradiating neo-kitsch folklore aesthetic which loans many of its elements from Pop Latino, Parr's work slides from the area of the anthropological folkloric survey to a representational set of memorabilia which rather than demonstrating the idiosyncrasy of the place depicted and the people who inhabit it, point to globalization as miracle and burden.
Martin Parr always makes sure to maintain a safeguarding distance from his pictures. He is a tourist wherever he goes and takes photographs as a tourist. In various occasions he has described himself as an outsider, a so-to-say “colonialist eye”, emphasizing his unpretentious relation with his camera’s shutter. But even so, there is much more for us to look for under the hood. Behind a supposedly unmediated response, Parr's images operate in their interiority less than consumers/mythographers and more as criticizers/demystifiers of the interpellant visual argument, which at first glance seems to set the rule for his whole photographic production. What we initially get as an overwhelming colourful effect embedded on the common awareness collapses under its proper weight. We are before the contemporary myth of Mexico, but will this mountainous whole be easy to digest?
There is a before and an after in Parr's vision, which makes it hard for us not to think of his Mexico, when looking at the souvenirs, photographs and books on the same subject produced decades ago. Still it is all there, in the sliding of signifiers, where a new hybrid meaning, deprived from any solid definition, arises amidst past and present representations. Parr's saints both are and are not Bob Schalkwijck's saints published forty years ago, in the same way that his Mexico is authentic and fake at the same time. It is pointless searching for an original in these pictures. In their very simulacra condition, they embody remakes without an original; reflections of a phantasmal imagery in which identity is played out for materialist tourist consumption. An iconological speech is constructed and Parr is the primary consumer. In such a subversive enactment, Mexico sustains a counter-cultural discourse whereby culture is the sum of consecutive speculations. Reinvented, recreated and irrupted, there emerges before our eyes a Mexico miles away from the land which once provided fertile soil for come of Buñuel's more surreal cinematic envisions. The corruption of aesthetic forms generated by today’s globalization renders the distance unavoidable and damages our sight, making it impossible for us not to wear these new glasses at the moment of seeing.
If Parr were not a photographer, he could perfectly afford to be a magician. His gaze seems to hypnotize his human subjects, be they Mexican or foreigners. There is a subversive suspension in these images that emanates from their interior rather than the exterior, and in doing so it conditions irremediably our generic gaze. In its face, a transition takes place to the world of meta-photography, whereby any attempt of viewing becomes reactivated in a novel context, as if pictures had to go through a sort of comparative demystification, earthly objectification and mirroring in order to obtain their full meaning. Shadows and memories, old family pictures, reproductions on souvenirs, bits and pieces scattered across the vastness of our visual lexicon and Martin Parr’s camera, are playfully challenging us. Still, on the other side of the mirror it is always us. By reworking/rethinking the very “performing of seeing”, we have a slight change of getting a bit closer to the heart of Mexican culture. If not, we can at least hope establishing a fuller “contemplative” relation with photography…
Mexico
Published by Chris Boot, 2007
ISBN: 0-954689488
htp://www.martinparr.com
http://www.magnumphotos.com
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
Published in Photoicon MEXICO issue 10/2009
The day Martin Parr “departed” with his camera from Great Britain, our view of Mexico changed forever. An international photography celebrity himself, Parr pulled Mexico into the post-modern iconography of global consumer culture. With their touch of banality, irony and ambiguity, his pictures negotiate for themselves a novel status as critical apparatuses of mutual contemplation among “us” and the “other”, “photography” and “meta-photography”.
Photography and the invention of “seeing”… Today we do not “see” the way we did some decades ago. This is an uncontested fact. The visual baggage we carry on our backs conditions our sight. We see the world through inherited eyes. We consult our visual archives' repertory, in order to disseminate meaning. And so do photographers –all of them– regardless of age, time and status. Rather than ineffably de facto statements, photographs today represent the “aftermath” of other photographs. They are rarely, properly speaking, representations of the outer reality, but rather “deictic” depictions of pre-existent representations. They are tools that both “open” and “shut” our eyes.
Andreas Gursky, Spencer Tunick, Martin Parr and others… All of these grand stars of the contemporary photography arena have had their share of Mexico. All of them have exercised a profound influence on the way we envision the imagery of a land in which Northern-American, Latin and indigenous cultures, colour and violence, modernity and past, cohere into an explosive surreal whole. All of them have “reinvented” Mexico, not just in terms of subject but, mostly, in terms of mode of representation. Although, when it comes to the passionate fascination with the populist trivialities of Mexican everyday material culture, Martin Parr has certainly gone further than anyone else. Ironic and subversively bitter, Parr's gaze has well called out to the cultural hybridism of a society where dichotomies collapse: it has, properly speaking, stolen into the heart of Mexican reality, so as to denaturalize and convert it at one and the same time into an “uncanny else” –a particular schizoid tourist artifice.
“Mexico” was released in 2007, following a dozen of books in which Martin Parr had already put his finger into leisure culture and its material and aesthetic derivatives. If the photographer had been at home documenting Britain's decadent beach sets, junk food and bad fashion, his avid passion for the recollection of uncanny iconological banalities was to find its most perfect expression in the plethora of postcards, souvenirs and objects collapsing Mexico's tourist market. Not surprisingly, Parr's close-ups, isolating exhaustively details of both Mexican and American imported modes and all sorts of eccentricities, bring about a holistic, yet not simplistic at all, vision of the surrounding tourist panorama.
These pictures of fried chickens, lollipops, multi-coloured saints and indigenous faces alone, would probably be expected not to do any better than any random picture coming out of the scrapbook of any sun-burnt British tourist, keen on encountering a pub on his way. Still, they certainly stand pretty well together in the sequence and the juxtaposition of formal elements as established in the book. Half-way between the colour of the American south (New Mexico, Texas and Eggleston are not so far away) and an irradiating neo-kitsch folklore aesthetic which loans many of its elements from Pop Latino, Parr's work slides from the area of the anthropological folkloric survey to a representational set of memorabilia which rather than demonstrating the idiosyncrasy of the place depicted and the people who inhabit it, point to globalization as miracle and burden.
Martin Parr always makes sure to maintain a safeguarding distance from his pictures. He is a tourist wherever he goes and takes photographs as a tourist. In various occasions he has described himself as an outsider, a so-to-say “colonialist eye”, emphasizing his unpretentious relation with his camera’s shutter. But even so, there is much more for us to look for under the hood. Behind a supposedly unmediated response, Parr's images operate in their interiority less than consumers/mythographers and more as criticizers/demystifiers of the interpellant visual argument, which at first glance seems to set the rule for his whole photographic production. What we initially get as an overwhelming colourful effect embedded on the common awareness collapses under its proper weight. We are before the contemporary myth of Mexico, but will this mountainous whole be easy to digest?
There is a before and an after in Parr's vision, which makes it hard for us not to think of his Mexico, when looking at the souvenirs, photographs and books on the same subject produced decades ago. Still it is all there, in the sliding of signifiers, where a new hybrid meaning, deprived from any solid definition, arises amidst past and present representations. Parr's saints both are and are not Bob Schalkwijck's saints published forty years ago, in the same way that his Mexico is authentic and fake at the same time. It is pointless searching for an original in these pictures. In their very simulacra condition, they embody remakes without an original; reflections of a phantasmal imagery in which identity is played out for materialist tourist consumption. An iconological speech is constructed and Parr is the primary consumer. In such a subversive enactment, Mexico sustains a counter-cultural discourse whereby culture is the sum of consecutive speculations. Reinvented, recreated and irrupted, there emerges before our eyes a Mexico miles away from the land which once provided fertile soil for come of Buñuel's more surreal cinematic envisions. The corruption of aesthetic forms generated by today’s globalization renders the distance unavoidable and damages our sight, making it impossible for us not to wear these new glasses at the moment of seeing.
If Parr were not a photographer, he could perfectly afford to be a magician. His gaze seems to hypnotize his human subjects, be they Mexican or foreigners. There is a subversive suspension in these images that emanates from their interior rather than the exterior, and in doing so it conditions irremediably our generic gaze. In its face, a transition takes place to the world of meta-photography, whereby any attempt of viewing becomes reactivated in a novel context, as if pictures had to go through a sort of comparative demystification, earthly objectification and mirroring in order to obtain their full meaning. Shadows and memories, old family pictures, reproductions on souvenirs, bits and pieces scattered across the vastness of our visual lexicon and Martin Parr’s camera, are playfully challenging us. Still, on the other side of the mirror it is always us. By reworking/rethinking the very “performing of seeing”, we have a slight change of getting a bit closer to the heart of Mexican culture. If not, we can at least hope establishing a fuller “contemplative” relation with photography…
Mexico
Published by Chris Boot, 2007
ISBN: 0-954689488
htp://www.martinparr.com
http://www.magnumphotos.com
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
Published in Photoicon MEXICO issue 10/2009
