The Magnum & World Press Photo Square Print Sale: Written by Light October 16–22
107 Square Prints priced at $110/£110/€120, available for one week only. Shop the collection now.
The Perfect Man
In India, industrial revolunever really started and never really ended, but western standards, which defined this new perfect working man, were imposed and accepted in a society that already had a very elitist cultural structure. The results were confusing.
De Middel tells the story of Doctor Ashok Aswani, who decided one day to go to the cinema instead of going to work. He saw a Chaplin movie four times, lost his job and started what would become the biggest festival homage to Chaplin in the world. Doctor Aswani would never be the perfect man because the perfect man works for his country’s greatness. The perfect man wakes up early to go to work and waves at his wife from the car as he heads towards the daily traffic-jam that would take him to his office. Charlot would never be the perfect man either.
Signed by Cristina de Middel
Think of Scotland
Wry and affectionate, simultaneously attuned to local color and the universality of human eccentricity, Parr’s photographic vision finds the magnificent absurdity in everyday life.
Though Parr is a prolific creator of photobooks, his archive of Scottish images has remained largely unpd; in fact, his Scottish photographs represent his largest unpd body of work to date. Martin Parr: Think of Scotland collects these images together for the first time on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the newly reopened Aberdeen Art Gallery. In Think of Scotland, readers can find the expected visual iconography of Scotland―the Highland Games, the stunning landscapes, the bagpipers―but all given that unique Parr twist that transforms the expected and the banal into something outlandish and unfamiliar.
Signed by Martin Parr