Martin Parr's 'Assorted Cocktail' retrospective at SantralIstanbul shows the uncomfortable normalcy of consumer life...

Right now, at a resort somewhere in the world, an ice cream cone is melting.  The eater, a housewife on holiday, is unaware that the pointed tip of her soft-serve swirl is flattening out and oozing off the backside.  A sticky hand.  The glance around to check if anyone has seen.  Switch the cone to the other hand, commence licking up the accident from the tops of fleshy knuckles.  Now imagine you’ve watched this (in only a matter of seconds) unfold before you.  How absurdly normal. 

For anyone who’s been hit like a bolt with the thought, “Darn, I wish I had my camera right NOW,” Martin Parr is a scavenger angel.  His sardonic eye turns up right under our noses to catch us being us, even when we can’t help it.  In a 156-piece retrospective at the SantralIstanbul, the viewer is treated to a medley of human foibles teased out from various worlds of leisure-time consumption.  The spontaneous, must-have buy (sometimes inflatable); the visor and fanny-pack combo; the exposed tan lines.  All of these the symptoms of the plastic half-life that come so clearly into focus once an individual leaves the urban office for a bit of respite.  But are we blameworthy?  No, Parr isn’t suggesting that we’re stupid.  Accidents of all shapes and sizes enliven our quotidian existence—we, the fallible bipeds who claim the backyards and boardwalks of this earth.  Drawing from earlier exhibitions with titles like “Knokke Le Zoute”, “Think of England”, “Think of Germany”, “Phone Project”, “Glasgow”, “Luxembourg”, “Mexico”, and “Last Resort”, this retrospective offers a map for charting our own grotesque evolution.

You walk through the gallery on the third floor of the former Silahtarağa power station and you can’t help thinking that the guy who shot these photos did so with a fancy disposable.  The material is flippant, spontaneous, but somehow searing.  It’s the angles and cropping employed by Parr that really make the images pop off the wall.  The collection has the look of a perfect distillation of “Gotcha” snaps from a lifetime of semi-intoxicated chaperoning during a career as a Princess Cruises on-shore activities coordinator.  The Flickr account album name would be “No Shame: Totally Awesome”.  But Martin Parr is nobody’s fool and a seasoned professional at his art.  A member of the esteemed photography agency Magnum Photo, Parr scouts his sites waiting for the inevitable letting-it-all-hang-out to happen.  Using macro lens and colour saturation techniques to their fullest extent, he lampoons modern life with the intimacy and stillness of the Discovery Channel.  The anthropology of holiday-makers.

Parr’s work, however, goes beyond the human form.  His prints itemize the details of consumption that serve as accessories to the wrinkles and flab splayed out of the lawn chair.  One of the most gripping images for me was a close-up of a woman’s hand holding a cigarette.  The leathery skin of her arm, leg, and abdomen in plain view, Parr directs us to the whiteness of the cigarette filter contrasted with the red nail varnish only centimetres away.   Decidedly middle-class jewellery is also captured in the frame.  The sun is beating down on her.  We also see the hibiscus flower in the crotch of her bikini bottom—this is a sort of Anthony Burgess riff on Georgia O’Keefe touch to add to the discomfort.  If it were a movie set, even then you’d want to run over with a robe and cover her up.  The helplessness of the scene can be disturbing unless you allow yourself to laugh.  It’s like when grandma breaks wind at the dinner table and all the adults bite their lips, quickly scan the other adult faces for a reaction cue, until the little cousins break the silence with giggles.  The correct reaction!  Because it’s funny (and a little bit sad).  But more funny.

For a Turkish audience there might be special delight in the depictions of food: oversized, quickly prepared, and ravenously eaten.  The salty pretzel, the cheeseburger, or the salsa verde in a Styrofoam bowl, each has a role to play in fulfilling the culinary cliché of a particular culture.  Parr is very clear about one thing when he speaks about his work: the garishness or kitsch that intellectuals poo-poo is enduringly attractive to people.  The colours help.  When light glints off greasy cheese, or candies clink together in a familiar way, primal juices flow in all of us.  Our senses are stirred and we want to consume.  We have to consume.  Parr cleverly borrows the visual trick of quaintness from the American painter Wayne Thiebaud—famous for his rows of pastel cakes and gumball machines.  Gentle settings where people are having fun make it seem all the more OK.  The tight zooms narrow our attention to the object of our latent desire, and then it’s hard to fight back the craving.  These are the unpaid for advertisements that move life forward. 

Martin Parr is a collector of many things, postcards being one of them.  I also collect postcards—the ones I send to myself with inane things written on them.  Some of them so filled with exuberance about the “amazing time I’m having in Costa Rica” that they’re startling to read in the quiet of my room many weeks later.  Projecting back to the thrill of the waterfall and rafting can be a head-scratcher.  One

leaves the Martin Parr retrospective a little loopy.  How soon the outside world becomes that cluttered confusion of moments without clear borders and captions.  'Am I ridiculous?' I think, as I get in the taxi.  On the ride home I have this feeling, the one a guy might have upon learning in the morning that he’d gotten a tramp stamp after three too many tequilas.  In the fog of the hangover, trying to balance the then and now is complicated: awesome night with whatever her name was, versus daisies are forever.  I shake my head.

“Assorted Cocktail”, Parr excellence, will be at SantralIstanbul until October 30th.