From the Pope to a Flat White - Ireland, 1979-2019 - Beau Livre

When they were first displayed in 1984, Parr's sequence of images of Morris Minors abandoned in fields and yards seemed mostly funny, a brilliantly subversive take on the tradition of Irish landscape painting and photography in which the human presence is erased. They still are, but they also now have a more forlorn air - something is being forsaken. A way of life is being cast off. Time is erasing these vestiges of a more frugal past.
The humour has not diminished but the poor old cars, gradually sinking back into nature, have something of the poignancy of the archaeological remains of a lost civilisation. And if they can be abandoned so ruthlessly, what else can be ditched ? From the Pope to a Flat White brings together Parr's photographic record of an Ireland that is now almost unrecognisable from the land he first visited in 1979 : a chronicle of what we have lost, how we have grown and what we have gained.
Fintan O'Toole.