A Weird Jaunt Through Vienna With a Legendary Magnum Photographer

When curator Verena Kaspar-Eisert and the staff at Viennese museum Kunst Haus Wien decided to host a major retrospective of the idiosyncratic Magnum photographer Martin Parr, they also offered him the opportunity to come to the city and create a new body of work. He couldn’t resist.

“He has made photographic journeys to many places all over the world. I think in Vienna he was looking to find out if the clichés he had heard about the city were true—and they actually are. We do eat schnitzel a lot,” Kaspar-Eisert said via email.

Parr visited the Austrian city twice to make his book, Cakes & Balls, which AnzenbergerEdition published in June. Like Parr’s work generally, the photos showcase a keen curiosity about the world around him and a winking knowledge of human nature.

On his first trip last September, Parr asked Kaspar-Eisert to take him to “typical Viennese places,” and she complied. They went to the Gänsehäufel, a gigantic public swimming pool, as well as traditional, tourist-friendly wine taverns and cafes and a factory where cakes and sweets are made. Even the most straightforward subjects are transformed into something unexpected and uncomfortable through Parr’s lens. Food, for instance, looks by turns comic, garish, and sexually suggestive.

“The ordinary life is what is of interest for Martin Parr. He has always focused on the habits and traditions we have in the so-called first world. He wants to document what is going on in the supermarket around the corner, how we prepare our food, how we spend our leisure time,” she said.

Parr returned to Vienna this February in time for the city’s famous ball season. There are more than 400 balls staged in the city every winter, and they are glitzy, formal affairs that last all night. Parr’s photos capture the pomp and glamour of the events, but they also highlight the vanity and the absurdity hiding just beneath the surface.

“He wants to show the world at it is—in his eyes. He wants to make a photographic survey of the normal things we do rather than making PR pictures that show how we wish things to be,” Kaspar-Eisert said.

The exhibit, “Martin Parr,” is on display at Vienna’s Kunst Haus Wien until Nov. 2.