The culture of football fandom is the theme of two new solo exhibitions that are featured from this month at the OOF Gallery in Warmington House, part of Spurs’ Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Wolves fans celebrate their team scoring at Molineux Stadium, 2012. Copyright: Martin-Parr / Magnum Photos / courtesy of OOF Gallery
The pictures come from Martin Parr, one of the world’s leading photographers, who has documented the national game for decades.
From freezing cold northern stadiums to sunburned shirtless fans, Martin Parr has been documenting football and the culture around it since the start of his career.
But the game itself never appears in his work.
Instead, Parr watches the watchers, capturing people at the game, celebrating, commiserating, or just meditatively lost in the moment of following their team.
That’s what this exhibition is about: the unity, passion, ecstasy and community of football.
The show features a series of images of celebrating football fans, and a room of rarely seen early black and white photos of stark, desolate stadiums in Bolton, Bradford, Halifax and Hartlepool.
This is an exhibition about how much football means to so many people, how essential it is to their daily lives, while Parr has created possibly his most earnestly positive portrait of British culture.
The exhibition runs from March 18th to May 8th, with a second exhibition running in tandem, featuring the football related art of Corbin Shaw.
Together, these exhibitions look at what it means to watch football, and how the game is the beating heart of our society.
This is a celebration of obsession and belief, of cold nights on concrete terraces, of chucking your pint in the air in jubilation.
It’s a celebration of football.
