At the new Magnum Gallery and Bookshop on Impasse Delaunay in Paris, In Plain View gathers prints and archive material by Martin Parr, the first exhibition of his work since his death in December.
Magnum Gallery and Bookshop opens its new Paris space on Impasse Delaunay with the work of a photographer who did not live to see it. Martin Parr died in December, and In Plain View is the first show of his work since. On view from 28 March to 6 June 2026, it is less a retrospective than an inventory: prints, archive material, texts and correspondence, and rooms built so that visitors can stand inside one of his pictures.
It begins in black and white. Through the 1970s Parr photographed close communities in the north of England and in Ireland, and those pictures hold a plain, unshowy humanism. At the Mayor of Todmorden's inaugural banquet in 1977, a row of guests in check and worsted bends over a buffet table with the concentration of people who have queued for it. Nobody is caught out. The camera stands close enough to notice, and stops there.
Then colour, and the flash, and the ring-lit close-up that turned his name into a genre. Common Sense makes an American breakfast plate look like both a still life and an accusation: fried egg, corned beef hash, waffle, a sealed tub of pancake syrup. Think of England finds a man in a grey top hat at Ascot pressing a mobile to his ear in front of a red telephone box. On a lawn in Chew Stoke, tea travels from a chrome pot into bone china held at arm's length. Beaches, tourism, fashion and cups of tea: he treated all four as evidence.
The archive half of the show belongs to the agency. Parr joined Magnum as an associate, became a full member and later served as its president, and the letters and papers on the walls track a long argument he kept having with the institution about what documentary could be. “Martin stretched the definition of documentary inside the agency,” says Marine Merindol, Magnum's Chief Operational Officer. “By doing so, he opened the door to a new generation of photographers.”
What he built, in the end, was a shorthand. “He is known as a photographer, a photographer loved by the public,” says Magnum photographer David Hurn, who describes people looking at a picture and saying, it's a Martin Parr. Almost nobody else earns that sentence. Lorenzo Meloni, Magnum's co-president, puts it in plainer terms: “His humor, his clarity, and his vision shaped many discussions across the agency and within the wider photographic world.”
The timing gives the city two Parr shows at once, with Global Warning running concurrently at the Jeu de Paume. Prints here are available to acquire, alongside photobooks, which suits a man who spent a career making the ordinary collectible. Shortly before he died he was asked what he expected of the archive he was leaving. “Pictures live on.”
