Forty years of transformation and upheaval: compiling Martin Parrs longstanding love affair with Ireland
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Martin Parr (born 1952) has been taking photographs in Ireland for 40 years. His work covers many of the most significant moments in Irelands recent history, encompassing the Popes visit in 1979, when a third of the countrys population attended Mass in Knock and Phoenix Park in Dublin, to gay weddings in 2019.
Parr lived in the West of Ireland between 1980 and 1982. He photographed traditional aspects of rural life such as horse fairs and dances, but also looked at the first hints of Irelands new wealth in the shape of the bungalows that were springing up everywhere, replacing more traditional dwellings. During subsequent trips to Ireland he explored the new estates around Dublin, documented the North and showed how, after the Good Friday agreement, the Troubles became the focus of a new tourist boom.
The final chapter of this book portrays a contemporary Dublin where start-up companies are thriving, the docks area is being gentrified and where icons of wealth and modernity are ubiquitous. Ireland has also now voted to allow both abortion and gay weddings, developments that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago. Parr published a book of his original black-and-white photographs in 1984. A Fair Day had an introduction by Fintan OToole, who subsequently became Irelands leading cultural commentator.
Martin Parr is one of the best-known documentary photographers of his generation. The author of more than 100 books and the editor of 30 others, he has firmly established his photographic legacy. He has also curated two photography festivals: Arles in 2004 and the Brighton Biennial in 2010. More recently he curated the Barbican exhibition, Strange and Familiar. In 1994 he became a full member of Magnum Photographic Cooperative. Between 2013 - 2017 Martin was president of Magnum Photos. In Autumn 2017 the Martin Parr Foundation opened in Bristol. In 2013 he was appointed visiting professor of photography at the University of Ulster. Parrs work has been collected by many of the major museums, including the Tate, the Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
