Martin Parr in Angkor, 2012

As a chronicler of the anthropocene age and its excesses, including mass tourism, photographer Martin Parr (1952−2025) had to come and see Angkor. During his 2012 visit, he took some 30 photographs deposited at Magnum photo agency, which he had joined in 1994 and presided over from 2014 to 2017. After being kindly allowed to go through this Magnum collection — probably the one and only repository, to which we were directed when we asked the Martin Parr Foundation (established in 2017 in Bristol, England) to help us in tracking Angkor-related works -, here is a selection of 6 photographs. This is the first time Parr’s unique approach to our world is featured as applied to a site of such significance for the world’s cultural heritage and for the people of Cambodia.

As far as we know — and we had planned to inquire directly with the photographer himself before his sudden passing in December 2025 -, Martin Parr didn’t write much about experiencing the Angkorian site in 2012. Precisely right after that experience, however, he wrote on his blog:

Mass tourism is one of the subjects I have photographed consistently over the years. I have documented many of the most well known tourist sites in the world including Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat and Copacabana beach. Tourism is the biggest industry in the world and the tourist spend is always growing, despite the current downturn in global economies.

One thing that has really changed in recent years is how the tourist uses photography. When I started shooting this topic many years ago, people would take one photo of themselves in front of the site and move on. Now mobile phone cameras and digital photography mean that the entire visit is documented. From the moment the tourist enters the site, everyone has to be photographed in front of every feature of note. Now it is almost impossible for me to shoot a photo where someone is NOT taking a picture or posing for one. So I am under the impression that no-one is really paying attention to the splendours and beauties of the site, as the urge to photograph is so overwhelming. The photographic record of the visit has almost destroyed the very notion of actually looking. […] 

Hang on, I hear you say, surely this is all too cynical. For if anyone has a shocking carbon footprint it is me. What am I doing at these sites? Doing exactly what I am now questioning ie taking photographs. Do I think tourism is good thing? Of course. It provides a much needed economic boost to countries that are struggling. It educates and enlightens the tourist. Perhaps it is the iconic sites that we all know before we get there that are in danger of becoming overwhelmed. Other equally impressive but less known sites tend to become overlooked.

My theory is that the act of photographing ourselves at tourist sites becomes so important because it makes us feel reassured that we are a part of the recognisable world. ​“Too Much Photography”, Martin Parr Blog, Apr. 2012.]

Machu Picchu (2010) and Angkor (2012) by Martin Parr, from Martin Parr’s Blog.

Machu Picchu (2010) and Angkor (2012) by Martin Parr, from Martin Parr’s Blog.

This sample of Martin Parr’s work in Angkor, however limited it is — and we do hope that some day there will be a book titled Martin Parr’s in Angkor, not a glossy coffee-table product but a humble, locally-made one, just like he did for Macchu Pichu (2010) or India (2013) -, certainly tells us more about the photographer than the myriads of photographs he took in more chartered territories, be it English or Irish ​‘Old Country’, crowded beaches across the planet, or even the fashion industry microcosm. Something special happened in Angkor, and you can see on the unusually candid shots. Was it because tourists in Angkor, even during the brief peak of overtourism experienced in the decade preceding the 2020 Covid pandemic, weren’t mere tourists but somehow pilgrims to an imagined — or real, for true Buddhist believers — sacred spot? After all, even the French blasé novelist Pierre Loti depicted himself at the turn of the 20th century as ​‘a pilgrim at Angkor’, and more than 120 years later his short book remains one of the most sought-after reference.

Beyond ​‘Touristy’

The other singularity of Angkor amongst UNESCO world heritage sites is that it is a real living site, with actual people working and residing near the temples, and with Cambodians from all around the country — and from the diaspora — deeply feeling their connections to it. This aspect caught the eye of the photographer as shown in its photographs of newlyweds in front of Angkor Wat or Cambodian families by the serene expanse of water at Srah Srang ស្រះស្រង់, the Royal reservoir east of Banteay Kdei. Suddenly, the old dilemma between tourism and authenticity became somehow irrelevant. In Angkor, Parr’s keen eye registered ​‘locals’ who weren’t ​‘performing’ for the visitors but were just here, awed yet comfortable with the majestic relics of their past. This is probably why we can find some softening in Parr’s typically sharp way of documenting tourism — yet he always pointed to the economic benefits of tourism for developing countries, and rejected the elitist vilification of ​‘mass tourism’. 

In Global Warning, the first substantial study on Martin Parr’s body of work published after his death and catalog of the eponymous, widely attended exhibition at Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris, one contributor noted 

“The paradox for tourists is that they want to go where there are no tourists. To put it another way: they turn the places they go into places they don’t want to go to. […] Many of Parr’s photos show tourists pursuing this dream; the absurdity of their situation may be amusing, but there is also something pathetic about their inevitable failure. Ultimately, those who enjoy the most successful or even the most authentic experience are post-tourists who, like Parr, adapt to — or even embrace- the artificiality of these situations. [Jean-Francois Staszak, ​“Martin Parr’s Small World and Globetrotters,” Global Warning, Phaidon Press, 2026, p. 50 – 2]

In Angkor, this prism falls out of the picture, so to speak. The photographer notices the tour guides with their little flags, the souvenir hawkers, the relentless shooting of smartphone photos, and in the end what remains on the visitors’ strained faces is mostly wonderment, a sense of harmony oozing from the usually hectic tourist scenes. Ultimately, the photographs give us an insight of how a talented, strongly committed to his vision creator was seeing the world, and possibly wished us to react positively to his outlook. These photos are not ​‘kitsch’ — a label he gladly assumed for himself while remarking that it was ​‘a really complex notion’ -, they don’t express the ​“quiet grief” and the feeling of ​“loss, evaporation of a world in which the social fabric had weight and materiality and some degree of tensile strength, and its wholesale replacement by a world in which that fabric is woven of nothing more than digits flickering unendingly in the dark”, to quote Adam Greenfield’s essay in Global Warning [op. cit., p. 207].  

Similarily, the stunning image of Western tourists capturing with their cameras a lonely monkey on the main esplanade leading to Angkor Wat under the quite quizzical glance of an Asian lady visitor encapsules the whole story. Martin Parr has been criticized for the fact that ​“the animals in [his] images have been rendered invisible as they are manifested as consumer goods,” a result of a cultural pattern that would make most of us ​“terribly violent in our pacifism, caught in a globalized community that reassures us even while it leaves us implacably alone.” [p. 153, 156] The scene at Angkor in Parr’s lenses comes across as radically estranged from such theorizations. APSARA Authority, in charge of Angkor Archaeological Park, has attempted for years to keep monkey’s onsite population to a level that wouldn’t infringe on their natural habitat while preventing damages to the ancient buildings and physical harm to the visitors. The photo is in fact a case study of that issue — Westerners avidly trying to shoot that evidence of wildlife in a free environment, one tiny connection to the animal realm they can only get visiting a zoo, the Asian onlooker astonished by their nervousness in front of a rather common sight for her, and the monkey looking away, unaffected by that human fussing around. Cross-purposes at the gates of Angkor.

The Empathetic Satirist

1) Part of Martin Parr’s work with Oxfam in Vietnam in The Guardian, Dec. 2009]. 2) Elegance at the gas pump ‑one of many Martin Parr’s photographs at Global Warning Exhibition, Paris, Musée du Jeu de Paume, Jan.-May 2026.

1) Part of Martin Parr’s work with Oxfam in Vietnam in The Guardian, Dec. 2009]. 2) Elegance at the gas pump ‑one of many Martin Parr’s photographs at Global Warning Exhibition, Paris, Musée du Jeu de Paume, Jan.-May 2026.

Three years before Angkor, in 2009, Martin Parr had been invited by the global organization Oxfam to go to the province of Quang Tri and photograph the local families confronted to the ever more drastic consequences of floods and typhoons due to climate change. ​“Many people are getting into serious debt as they borrow huge sums of money to replace crops, repair houses and send their children to school,” noted the editorial comment to the series published in The Guardian, 8 Dec. 2009. It was an eye opener, and one decade later, in 2021, he would remark — ​“I can see now how nearly all the images I have recently taken are related to climate change.”

Also in 2009, at the same time he was documenting the extreme vulnerability of humans facing natural disasters, he had started his project code-named Luxury, tracking the extreme vanity of hyper-consumerism. Writing on his blog, he raised an existential question:

I photograph wealth in the same spirit as has traditionally been associated with photographing poverty, an updated version of the ​‘concerned photographer’ but disguised as entertainment. For surely, what is the main indirect cause of our increasing carbon emissions, but the increasing wealth of our planet?

These images of Angkor are the work of a photographer certainly inscribed in the time-honored English tradition of satirists, yet never removing himself entirely, emotionally speaking. For a satirist, lucidity devoid of empathy can easily turn into some out-of-touch bitterness. In front of the lasting relics of past human ingeniosity (genius), the acute observer has also to ponder, and to marvel without waxing lyricism.