An exhibition in Paris on the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martin Parr. For a reconciliation

Through Jan. 29, 2023, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson’s new exhibition space, the Tube Gallery, presents an exhibition on the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson (Chanteloup, 1908 - Montjustin, 2004) and Martin Parr (Epsom, 1952), curated by François Hébel, director of the Fondation, and organized with the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol. With a “great divide” between them, according to Parr, the exhibition titled Reconciliation aims to reconcile the two photographers through their perspectives on Northern British society, in terms of work and leisure, in three different eras.

Photographer Martin Parr has stirred controversy with his color photographs of Britain’s “middle class” on the beaches of northern England. His attempt to join theMagnum Photo agency in 1989 caused uproar-even the agency’s co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson was annoyed. A meeting between the two artists eventually led to an amicable reconciliation and the possibility of coexistence between their different views on photography, which, in Cartier-Bresson’s words, come from “two separate solar systems.” Parr joined Magnum Photos in 1994.

In 2021, the Cinémathèque française unearthed a film by Douglas Hickox, made for the British television network ITV/ABC in 1962. In Stop Laughing - This is England, Cartier-Bresson offers an amusing portrait of Englishmen at work and in activity in the industrial part of the country. His photographs, commissioned for the film, as well as the commentary, bear an uncanny resemblance to Martin Parr’s much vilified work, published in The Last Resort in 1986, some 24 years later.

The Reconciliation exhibition features Cartier-Bresson’s original prints, raw material for the film (also on view), The Last Resort, a book by Martin Parr, and Black Country Stories, one of Parr’s most recent commissions (2009/2010), which sees the artist return to the north of England to take photographs...of Englishmen at work and at leisure: three eras and two perspectives on a society and its transformations (1962, 1986, 2010).

Image: Martin Parr, Blackpool (1993) © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

An exhibition in Paris on the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martin Parr. For a reconciliation

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