Mexico. Toy Cars on Street Stall (2006)
Photograph Lambda C-type 49 x 74,5 cm. Courtesy: Galería Rafael Ortiz, Sevilla
Martin Parr likes to brings to the fore the most common and banal aspects of life in our contemporary society, and very especially everything having to do with consumer society and the effects of mass-production. He is a chronicler of social, consumer, tourism excess, of the banal, of globalisation processes. The works selected for this show affect this specific aspect of globalisation. Two images taken in Mexico record a dissolution of the traditional, the tension between local customs and progress, between idiosyncrasy and homogenisation. In them, we see how the reality of cars is adapted to the feeling and need of the local, to the specific conditions of each territory, but we also notice that it in turn affects the perspective each country has of automobiles. Martin Parr’s ironic commentary on the above-mentioned effects and tensions is articulated under the form of visual contamination: the omnipresence of the automobile in our society.
