CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/17/2021

A wry and affectionate vision of Ireland in Martin Parr's 'From the Pope to a Flat White'

"Allihies, Kilnamanagh, County Cork" (1997) is reproduced from Martin Parr: From the Pope to a Flat White, Ireland 1979–2019, the photographer's wry documentation of change in Ireland over the past four decades. "Irishness has always been to some extent a performance," Fintan O'Toole writes, "whether of piety or of revelry, of sophistication or of simplicity—even, in Parr’s images of Troubles tourism, of tragedy. It continues to be so even in a globalized world of flat whites and yoga sessions… From the Pope to a Flat White brings together Parr’s photographic record of an Ireland that is now almost unrecognizable from the land he first visited in 1979: a chronicle of what we have lost, how we have grown and what we have gained."