Collecting photos, collecting world

Why do people take photos when traveling? What do they really want to capture? Why do people buy souvenirs? This is exactly what the exhibition of Martin Parr explores: the surprising relations between photography and collecting in the context of the touristic experience.

The exhibition links photography and collecting in terms of the creative nature they share: the act of choice and appropriation. However, the perspective adopted by the exhibition has a more sociological orientation, given that it encompasses two forms of intervention within the context of tourism (considering this as a set of permanent, more or less universal coordinates, that affect the ways of living in modern society).

Thus, the show examines whether Parr’s photography seeks to intervene in reality at an analytical level or rather intends to record percussive images that are in general shocking, grotesque or kitsch outright, with a purely illustrative or aesthetic end. On the other hand, beyond any strict sociological work we cannot forget Parr’s technical and poetic approach in his photographs.

 

Photography as collecting

What photographies capture, and is therefore likely to be collected, are experiences. As Susan Sontag said, “collecting photographs is collecting the world. [...] Photographs are experience captured”. The photograph creates a fragmented reality, dissolving the unitary vision, and more importantly, endowing everything it records with importance, thus placing in a plane of equality what was previously considered beautiful and what was not. In this sense, the exhibition also proposes a reflection on the meaning of the insignificant.

 

Collecting as an identifying reflex of the collector, as a portrait, as a photograph

The exhibition brings together Martin Parr’s collection with that of Juanjo Fuentes. They both deal with compulsive collecting as well as mass, systematic results in relation to a type of subject that it is difficult to define and interpret. Fuentes’ collection includes, without discrimination, an interesting selection of work by artists next to a set of banal decorative objects.

The exhibition also includes a set of pieces, made from the photographic work of Martin Parr (self-portraits, the Small World series on the touristic experience, ex novo photographic work on Barcelona and tourism, photographs of Juanjo Fuentes’ house) and objects from his own collection (“Boring Postcards”, souvenir objects, etc.), along with Juanjo Fuentes’collection just as it is laid out at his home in Málaga.

 

The Exibition runs until the 21st of October at CCCB