Tom Hopkinson Room, 5 Great Newport Street

Martin Parr’s latest series of photographs focuses on the great British obsession, ‘Bad Weather’. Although it is something which preoccupies us, photographers have preferred not to photograph in bad weather. For Martin Parr however, “The worse the weather, the happier I am”. He feels that bad weather often creates an atmosphere lacking in bright, sunny weather, and has gone out to see how bad weather reveals the character of the things we see.

Working with an underwater camera and flash-light he presents a bizarre and often humorous world turned topsy-turvy by wind or rain. Waldemar Januszczak has written “He  searches not for the drama of bad weather but for its loneliness, the way it seems to drive all living things under cover,  and leaves a nature populated only by ghostly inanimate objects”. The photographs alternate between realism and surrealism and Mark a transition in Martin Parr’s work from the more nostalgic early themes such as Beauty Spots (1976) and the Non-Conformists (1981), to a greater involvement with modern subjects and contemporary issues.

The exhibition will involve the installation of relevant meteorological material and will coincide with the publication of his first book by Zwemmer. [ISBN: 978-0302999967]

For further information on this and past exhibitions, visit our Archive and Study Room.