NO SMOKING : MARTIN PARR

11 Dec 2024-5 Apr 2025

PV 11 Dec 2024, 6-8pm

Overview

NO SMOKING

This exhibition, and limited edition photobook, is dedicated to the increasingly controversial subject of smoking. Spanning the length of Parr’s career – with photographs from 1970 to 2019 – this exhibtion highlights the evolution of smoking culture over the last five decades.

Throughout his career Martin Parr has captured daily life as it really is and as you sift through the archives it is rather difficult to not stumble upon a cigarette, cigar, pipe or – in recent years – a dreaded vape. So, with murmurs of the United Kingdom banning the purchase of tobacco by anyone born after 2009, no time seems more ideal to offer up a typically Parr commentary on society’s ever-changing relationship with smoking. This survey of smoking culture is curated by Sid Stephenson and the corresponding book is published by The Rocket Press in a limited edition of 750 numbered copies, supported by DMB Represents.

COMMON SENSE (Side Gallery)

2024 marks the 25th Anniversary of the first exhibition of Martin Parr's celebrated & influential series of photographs on international consumerism: Common Sense. The original presentation as a grid of 350 colour Xeroxes was premiered at Rocket, London in 1999 and simultaneously shown at 52 locations around the world. In honour of this we will also be recreating part of the original Xerox grid installation.

Artists