‘People are really in their element’: Martin Parr on capturing bar culture, and his look back with Campari

What comes to mind when thinking about stock photography? Is it the record kept by brands of products, placements and situations relating to their business? It could sound quite pedestrian but if that brand was a drink, then the possibilities within this body of photography are many. In celebration of its archive, Campari has joined forces with legendary agency Magnum Photos to combine documentary photography of bars around the world with its own images.

‘Bar Stories on Camera’, now in its third iteration, has already visited Galleria Campari in Milan and is currently on view at Camera in Turin (until 6 October 2024). On its way, the show stopped at Art Basel 2024 in Basel for a special edition curated by British photographer and national treasure Martin Parr.

In the Turin show, Parr’s work – known for its focus on people celebrating, from the hedonism of 1980s Tories to the coming together of people at the races – features alongside fellow Magnum masters including Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, and Ferdinando Scianna, in a selection that unites images from the last 90 years.

Martin Parr on ‘Bar Stories on Camera’

Parr has been shooting people at leisure since he began taking photographs, and the earliest example of his work in ‘Bar Stories’ was taken in 1973 in Manchester when he was a student, as he told Wallpaper* earlier this year.

‘I studied photography in Manchester, so that's a downtown bar near Canal Street,’ he said of the shot's location. ‘I can't remember the exact place, but I used to go out there, in the evening, and just take my camera with me. You can see people dancing and I like that there's a mix of diversity in there.’

Parr told us he takes many more bad photos than good ones, and the bustling environments that have been the focus of his work mean chance plays a huge role in the results.

‘It feels a challenge, to try and work out how you get a better one and also try and work out your connection to the world through photography,’ he said. ‘How you define what a good picture is [is] impossible to say; if I knew I'd write it down and retire. But that's the magic of photography, you never quite know when a good picture is going to show up. So that's exciting and, of course, when you go out, you hope to and expect to take a good picture, but most of the time, you don't. I have very high standards; I reject so many of my own pictures. But if you're there in the right place at the right time, you're more likely to get something and you need to take all these bad pictures to get a good one.’

Going through Campari’s archive for the Art Basel show’s curation, Parr’s mission was to simply to ‘pick the best pictures’, he said, and create a balance between the colour and black and white photographs.

What might have been a simple logging of a time and a place when an image was shot takes on new meaning when seen through the lens of history. ‘[The images are] all coming together under the theme of bars, of course, and this is about Campari, so you see Campari being advertised, but this one,’ he explained, gesturing to a photograph, ‘is from the day the divorce became legal in Italy, it's on the headline of a newspaper. Now, of course, you don't see people reading newspapers, but you see people using smartphones.’

An expert on capturing subjects in the throes of abandon, Parr observed, ‘If people are dancing, they very rarely say anything, they're too busy having a good time. So dancing is one of those things which is quite neutral. People may question, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Quite understandably but once the place is up and running and rocking, that's it. You've got the freedom and people really are in their element, in their essence.’

Campari’s cleverness in mixing Magnum photography with anonymous documentation from its vaults is that we see the expert eye in both, and in what has been captured over the decades.

The current ‘Bar Stories’ exhibition is at Camera, Turin, and includes 22 images from the Galleria Campari Historical Archive and 28 from Magnum’s archives. Until 6 October 2024

magnumphotos.com

camera.to/en/mostre/bar-stories-on-camera-2/