Photographer Martin Parr exhibits in Bologna

His gaze is instantly recognisable, a brightly coloured magnifying glass that creates stories from reality, capturing authentic and often eccentric moments of everyday life by capturing the essence of a place or situation through the search for the perfect detail, offering a unique and often provocative perspective of contemporary society.

Martin Parr, born in 1952, undoubtedly one of the most successful and recognised British documentary photographers of our time - chooses the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna to present the exhibition project Short & Sweet, which he directly curated, together with Magnum Photos, after the wide public success recently obtained at Mudec - Museo delle Culture in Milan.

From 12 September 2024 to 6 January 2025 the exhibition "Martin Parr. Short & Sweet" - produced by 24 ORE Cultura-Gruppo 24 ORE in collaboration with the Museo Civico Archeologico del Settore Musei Civici Bologna and Magnum Photos, and with the patronage of the Municipality of Bologna - presents more than 60 photographs chosen and selected by the author, together with installation elements and wall papers, and retraces his long career through his best-known projects that tell of his unprecedented documentary style within the social and cultural inconsistencies of the Western world, especially Europe.

Through an unfiltered and unrhetorical photographic chronicle, the exhibition opens with the Non-Conformists series, black-and-white images taken from 1975 to 1980 by an unprecedented, young and inspired Parr, through to the better-known colour series: from The Last Resort, an outrageous and bitterly ironic reportage conducted by the photographer on the beaches of Brighton, to Common Sense, photographs that sardonically explore the plasticised and tawdry reality of consumerism, up to the next project, still ongoing, which is still about tourism and Parr's willingness to take us to many famous sites, showing the difference between the idealised mythology of the place and the reality despoiled by the 'use' of the place itself.

Along with tourism, there is also dancing, a theme that shows the crazy energy Parr records on the dance floor and the collective body manifesting itself without reserve. The exhibition concludes with a subject Parr has always dealt with, the beach, with images from all over the world, in a kaleidoscope of imagery of the undressed body showing itself in public.