Small World

First published in 1996 Small World is one of the most popular and most important of Martin Parr's books. This reprint is of the revised and extended 2018 edition which included more than 40 new photographs as well as featuring many of Martin Parr's most iconic images from the first edition. 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 almost three decades 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. A member of the prestiguous MAGNUM?photo agency Martin Parr is one of the best known photographers in the world today. He has published innumerable books and his work has been exhibited and published worldwide. Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and seven books of non-fiction, which have won numerous literary awards and been translated into 24 languages. He has been described as "one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers."