Observing Martin Parr's shots leaves an insatiable desire to eat and reflect. His photographs, displayed at “Photo&Food. Food in Magnum photographs from the 1940s to today,” curated by Walter Guadagnini, an exhibition organized by Earth Foundation in collaboration with Magnum Photos at Eataly Art House in Verona (2023) and later at Grand Tour Italia in Bologna (2025), are a masterpiece of violence, not because they depict violence, but because they overwhelm the viewer with an urge to provoke appetite. At other times, they leave one disgusted by the excess and hyper-realism of the food.
At the center of Parr's ultra-Pop-colored shots stands a celebration of indulgent and disturbing images, which also stem from the widespread practice of photographing food before eating it and sharing the image on social media, editing it to make the subject more tempting and inviting.
Parr’s food varies from gourmet delicacies from around the world to typical junk food products. Sometimes, they appear desirable as if they were healthy and nutritious, while at other times, they resemble disgusting creations: all inevitably consumed.
Parr seeks perfection in the details of shapes and colors in elaborately aesthetic dishes crafted by professional chefs, or sometimes emphasizing fatty or hyper-caloric ingredients. In other instances, he captures mass-market items sold in fast food chains, supermarkets and shopping malls. These are Real Foods: real foods, presented in their naturalness and exaggeration, as protagonists of a journey through the everyday lives of ordinary people. Parr selects authentic foods to invite the delirious but also pleasurable consumption of food through the eyes, transformed into the celebration of the purest form of culinary pornography.
