Small World is Martin Parr’s long running series exploring tourism on a global scale. First published in 1996–with a revised and updated edition published in 2007–2018 now sees a third edition adding brand new photography to the classic Parr series that has been in development for over 30 years. The third edition includes more than 40 new photographs as well as the most iconic images from Small World.
It is a biting, very funny satire in which Parr looks at tourism worldwide, exposing the increasingly homogenous ‘global culture’ where in the search for different cultures those same cultures are destroyed. The issues that Parr raised a decade ago when the book was first published are even more relevant today.
Whilst Parr’s larger-than-life troupe of tourists appear willing participants in an omnipresent consumer culture they are also bemused victims–at the mercy of larger social forces and locked into their insatiable craving for spectacle. Small World‘s citizens become a symbol of western society’s prosperous freedoms, declaring their power and their rights to travel, to choose and to consume.