The Rhubarb Triangle and Other Stories. Martin Parr Exhibition, The Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield.

Last Saturday it was my pleasure to visit the Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield to see the Martin Parr retrospective exhibition including his latest body of work, The Rhubarb Triangle.  I went along out of a sense of duty, never previously being a fan of his work.  However, I enjoyed it immensely.  I found the Rhubarb Triangle series fascinating and his earlier work I discovered to be incredibly observant and to have a wicked sense of humour.  Of his series on the middle classes from the 1980s a friend that I was with remarked, "Why did they let him photograph them; didn't they realise he was laughing at them!".  Having just read the paper by Eugenie Shinkle, Boredom Repition, Inertia: Contemporary Photography and the Aesthetics of the Banal in which she writes " Banality and the Banal show up frequently in accounts of the work of Thomas Ruff, Martin Parr, Richard Billingham and others;....", I was fascinated to see how observantly Martin Parr records the banality of everyday life.  It was eye-opening to overhear such comments as "I remember that...." or "We used to do that..." or we used to go ....".  These images evoke many memories in people and point out to them the humour and irony to be seen in society.  Photography in the exhibition was encouraged; I'm not sure whether this was at the behest of the gallery or Parr, himself, but I think he would have been amused at my capturing a shot of a group of girls taking a 'selfie' in front of one display next to a shot of Parr's of a man taking a 'selfie' of himself.

The exhibition begins with an ongoing series of work called Autoportrait in which a wide range of photographers have photographed Parr himself, often dressed in costumes provided by the photographer or in front of a backdrop.  These images trace the progress of technology from the days of film to the digital age and also reflect how a country wishes tourist to look at it.

At the centre of the exhibition is the new body of work, The Rhubarb Triangle.  This series is the culmination of two years work from 2014 - 2016 and resulted from a commission to document all aspects of the industry in the famous 'Triangle' between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell in West Yorkshire, which is famous for producing early forced rhubarb.  The is often freezing, backbreaking work, but rhubarb from the area has now secured special food status.    The often very large scale prints record all aspects of the process, the buildings and most importantly the growers and pickers. As Ed Cumming (2016) said in his Guardian review, "Rhubarb may be the title, but the pickers are the stars!".  I was interested to note that the images in both this and the next section of the exhibition were often very large, printed on an oyster-type paper and just pinned to the wall, albeit with special pins.

The second part of the exhibition was entitled Work and Leisure and featured photographs taken between 1986 and 2015.  They are divided into the two groups of the title.  The first includes shots of people working to produce the goods required by the wealthy of the world.  The second group is of pictures of leisure and consumption.  They present the different ways that people choose to spend their time and money.

 Also in this part of the exhibition was part of the series Common Sense taken between 1995 and 1999.  There are 350 images altogether taken all over the world.  Although they have been regarded as kitsch, Parr feels that they document the incredibly significant and dominant shift in modern life to a culture obsessed with consumerism.  The pictures are designed to be displayed in a grid, but not necessarily all 350 at once, as here.

The Last Resort series was taken between 1983-1985 when Parr and his wife lived in Wallasey near Liverpool.  When he took these photographs he was noted for his shift from black and white to colour.  They feature  holidaymakers in the resort of New Brighton.  The work was criticised at the time for being unsympathetic to the working classes at their most exposed.  Parr felt that it was a 'political body of work' and anti-thatcherism in nature.

The earliest work represented is a series of black and white images taken between 1975 and 1980 of Non-Conformist Chapels in West Yorkshire and their congregations.  He was recording an almost lost era where people lived and worked in isolation with few modern comforts.

Whist we were at the Hepworth we visited the excellent print fair in the nearby Calder converted mill space featuring over 40 noted print makers.  The building itself was particularly photogenic.

Cumming, E. (2016) Mysteries of the Rhubarb Triangle, Revealed by Martin Parr. [online] Guardian.  Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jan/31/mysteries-of-the-rhubarb-triangle [Accessed 07/03/2016]