Common Sense by Martin Parr: Festival Tribute

First presented in 1999, Common Sense is one of Martin Parr’s most ambitious and influential photographic projects. Bringing together images made across the world, the series turns Parr’s close, saturated and often humorous gaze towards the details of everyday life. From food and fashion to souvenirs, animals and consumer goods. Using a 35mm camera, ring flash and macro lens, Parr developed a distinctive visual language of fragments, surfaces and punchy colours, allowing seemingly insignificant details to build into a larger portrait of contemporary life.

The radicalism of Common Sense, however, extends beyond the photographs themselves. Parr deliberately rejected the conventions of photographic exhibition-making, presenting the work through inexpensive colour Xerox prints, a technology more commonly associated with everyday office and commercial printing than with the display of contemporary photography. By embracing a process designed for speed, repetition and circulation, the exhibition questioned the status of the photographic print as a precious object and opened up new possibilities for how photography could be reproduced, exhibited and distributed.

This radical approach continued through the exhibition’s unprecedented international dissemination. Rather than being conceived as a single exhibition in one place, Common Sense was designed to circulate simultaneously across the world. In April 1999, it was presented in 41 galleries across five continents, with 44 venues in total hosting the work during March, April and May. It was recognised as the largest simultaneous photography exhibition ever organised.

Common Sense therefore operates not only as a body of photographs, but as an experiment in mass visual communication. 

This exhibition is also a tribute to Martin Parr, who served as Artistic Director of the first edition of Bristol Photo Festival and remained a member of the festival’s Board until 2025, making his contribution to the festival’s development and vision a crucial part of its history.

Bio

Martin Parr was born in 1952 in Epsom, Surrey. He is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation. Having published over 100 books of his own and edited another 30 in his lifetime, Parr built a long-lasting legacy.

Parr also acted as a curator. He curated two photography festivals, Arles in 2004 and Brighton Biennial in 2010 and was the artistic director of the inaugural edition of Bristol Photo Festival in 2021. In 2016, he curated the Barbican exhibition, Strange and Familiar. Parr became a member of Magnum Photos in 1994 and was president from 2013 to 2017. In 2013, he was also appointed the visiting professor of photography at the University of Ulster.

Parr’s work has been collected by many of the world’s leading museums, from Tate in the UK to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He established the Martin Parr Foundation in 2017.

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