It doesn't happen often that I spontaneously burst out laughing in a museum, but it happened twice during my visit to the Martin Parr exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. Martin Parr has developed a truly unique style and some of his photographs are totally hilarious. I’ve been a fan of his work for years and I had been looking forward to his retrospective at the Jeu de Paume. Curated by director Quentin Bajac in close collaboration with Parr himself until his death in December 2025, the show distills five decades into 180 densely hung images. Parr sensed the exhibition would be his last, and its title, Global Warning, carries the weight of a final verdict.
The exhibition unfolds in five chapters, each tightening the screws on a civilization addicted to excess. "Leisure and Wastelands” shows crowded swimming pools and beaches, people baking in the sun and a deflating planet-shaped beach ball on a Benidorm beach. “Last Chance to Buy” inventories our consumerist gluttony, from Britons hauling cheap beer across the Channel to rows of overloaded shopping carts. Then comes a series of close-ups of nail polish, sausages, cakes, sweets, fries and souvenirs. Has any photographer skewered late-capitalist kitsch with such gleeful precision?
What makes Parr devastating is his refusal to moralize. He mocks his own tribe without arrogance, waging what he called a "visual guerrilla warfare" from a Dubai art fair to a casino resort in Las Vegas and Royal Ascot. His own carbon footprint, he conceded, was the cost of bearing witness.
The third section shrinks the globe under the boot of overtourism: tourists are shown propping up the tower of Pisa, asleep at an airport, photographing the pyramids at Giza and in Las Vegas and joining the crowds in Venice. Parr lamented that compulsive documentation had eroded genuine observation and his framing keeps puncturing the postcard to expose what lies beneath.
Lightness flickers briefly in a room devoted to animals — gulls thieving chips, a dog with sunglasses and a camel standing next to some wooden souvenir camels and an inflatable camel — but the exhibition ends on a sobering note with a section dedicated to “Technology Addiction”. Here, our addiction to oil and technology reign supreme. Gasoline pumps run endlessly, people are glued to their screens and their phones, conquering the world with their selfie sticks.
I won't disclose which photos made me laugh out loud — suffice it to say that it was in the "Animal Kingdom" section — because your sense of humor might be different than mine. I can assure you that many more people were giggling at some of the photos.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Phaidon, so if you cannot make it to the exhibition, you can buy it from your favorite local bookstore.
Martin Parr: Global Warning is at the Jeu de Paume in Paris until 24 May 2026.