A Not-Quite-Satisfying Meal

Martin Parr is arguably the most important British photographer since Bill Brant. As Janet Borden, whose eponymous gallery currently has up a display of Parr’s work, says, he is “huge” in Europe and the United Kingdom. In America he is not so well known, but usually admired by those familiar with him. His work is important because it poses important questions about culture and documentary photography but, myself, I’m ambivalent.Mr. Parr is the leading exponent of the tacky sublime. This is an aesthetic that develops at the conjunction of taste and class, art and sociology. Of course all aesthetics can be reduced to similar constituents, but Mr. Parr aims to use low means to high ends. His images are gaudy with heavily saturated colors, although his purpose is not sensual delight — or, at least, not just sensual delight — but social commentary. This is more apparent in the new photo book “Mexico” (Aperture, 88 pages, $32) from which the pictures at Borden are drawn, than it is viewing the 15 pictures on the wall. But viewing them on the wall is certainly an experience.Food — little of it healthy, and none of it gourmet — is a recurring motif in almost all of Mr. Parr’s projects. Fast food is a staple of whatever country he is in: McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are ubiquitous, as much for the deep reds in their logos as for their cultural valence. Of the images on display, 10 are concerned with food. Mr. Parr was taken in Mexico with indigenous varieties of pastries and confections whose main ingredient is sugar. The pictures are all untitled Lamda chromogenic prints, either 20 inches by 30 inches or 40 inches by 60 inches, and several are hosannas to glucose.One picture has a stack of improbably pink doughnuts taking up its lower right quarter. The pink is the pink used in highlighters or in the fake fur of very low-end bedroom slippers, with a tinge of purple. It is a credit to the human stomach that when challenged with matter of this fluorescence, it endures. Behind the doughnuts stands the woman selling them. She wears a green-and-white gingham jumper-like garment and a black print blouse decorated with white daisies whose centers are the same improbable pink. We see the woman’s hands, but the image stops at her shoulders, decapitating her. So she has a commercial function and a class identity, but no personhood: Whoever she may be, she is her pink goods and mismatched threads.Another picture is a close-up of nine buns about the size and shape of jelly doughnuts, covered with orange frosting and decorated with flowers drawn with green, white, and red frosting. These fill the picture frame, as if the world were constructed of dessert. And another has a few heads of garlic on a Kelly-green plastic plate sitting on a red-and-white plastic tablecloth of alternating squares in which there are either smaller red and white checkerboards, pictures of a red teapot, a red apple, or red cherries. A green plate with orange carrots on it is partially visible in the upper right. One of the larger pictures looks down on a tray of bottles of various hot sauces with their red and green caps. Only the caps in the foreground are in sharp focus, a deliberate technical decision that leaves most of the picture frustratingly blurred.The pictures can be very pleasant in a formal, abstract way. There is one with a pale green lime cut in eight pieces on a white square Styrofoam tray next to a black bowl of green salsa with a white plastic spoon in it. Next to the bowl is a Kermit-green condiment shaker with a cherry-red top. The table they are on is covered with a red plastic sheet with a checkerboard and “Vívela” printed on it in white. All this works together very nicely. But there is an enormous image of a pale tan hamburger roll on a white Styrofoam tray on a pale tablecloth whose only points of interest are a few sesame seeds and a sliver of brown meat peeking out from one side. A friend of mine says when she was in art school, the knowing photography students counseled, “If you can’t make it good, make it big.” This picture would probably work better as a 4-by-6 from the Photomat.In an interview, Mr. Parr told me that his project over the last 30 years has been to record the wealth of the Western world. His primary unit is not the individual picture, but the photo book: Along with many books of his own work, he has published a two-volume history of photo books. Much of his work gains coherence when it takes its place between the covers of a book. For instance, the sole portrait up at the gallery is a headshot of a Mexican man wearing a baseball cap decorated with a “USA” emblem and an eagle clutching arrows and olive branches in its talons. The book includes a series of similar headshots of Mexican men wearing baseball caps decorated with the logos of American corporations, products, and sports teams. These illustrate Mr. Parr’s theme of the influence on Mexican culture of its powerful neighbor to the north, but few of the portraits are individually compelling. When work becomes formulaic, the tendency is for it also to become easy and dull.There are two pictures up of female vacationers taking pictures or being photographed at Mexican tourist sites. These are more complex, with the pale, somewhat bloated Anglo bodies, their tacky clothes, their accessories, their class identities, and their relationship to the scenic and historic sites that serve as mere backdrops, coming into play. But the ring flash Mr. Parr uses eliminates shadows, and hence modeling, depth, and drama. He says he subverts the look of propaganda and commercial photography for his own purposes: When I asked if it was possible that the look of propaganda and commercial photography had subverted his art, we both laughed.wmeyers@nysun.comUntil November 22 (560 Broadway, between Spring and Prince streets, 212-431-0166).

A Not-Quite-Satisfying Meal

A Not-Quite-Satisfying Meal

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