Grand Hotel Parr : Photobooks by Martin Parr

Two hundred photobooks across five decades—a raucous, one-of-a-kind tour through Parr's monumental history with the medium. Published with PhotoBook Museum, Cologne. As a photographer, publisher, writer, collector and image editor, with an eye trained on the absurdities of our global consumer and leisure culture, Martin Parr (1952–2025) has been bringing the photobook into the consciousness of contemporary photography since the turn of the millennium, publishing more than 200 books over the course of five decades. Grand Hotel Parr accompanies the first comprehensive photobook retrospective on Parr, organized by the PhotoBookMuseum and the Neues Museum in Cologne, Germany. In an elaborate staging inspired by the appearance of a hotel complex, the titular exhibition invites visitors to explore over 200 of the artist's photobooks. The tour through the various rooms of the hotel, such as the billiard room, the dining room and the fashion boutique, picks up on various themes from Parr's publications, creating a bizarre world that vacillates between ostentation and kitsch. Grand Hotel Parr showcases photographs from this one-of-a-kind exhibition as well as a bevy of essays by scholars and curators who explore Parr's storied history with the medium.