Martin Parr's "Common Sense" — the series first shown to the public 27 years ago — is being exhibited again, giving a new generation of viewers a direct encounter with one of the most divisive bodies of work in contemporary British photography.

The rehang matters. "Common Sense" is not a quiet portfolio. It is the series in which Parr pushed his saturated, flash-lit, hyper-close scrutiny of consumer culture to its extreme: food, sunburn, merchandise, tourists, and the small vulgar details of leisure, rendered in colors that seem to shout. When it first appeared, critics split sharply over whether Parr was a satirist of late-20th-century consumption or simply a sneerer at ordinary pleasure.

Why does a 27-year-old series still draw crowds?

Because the questions it raised have not aged. Parr's photographs of everyday indulgence — ice creams, cafés, gift-shop excess — asked viewers whether looking closely at how people relax is affection, anthropology, or contempt. Nearly three decades on, the debate over documentary photography's right to make its subjects look ridiculous has only intensified. A renewed exhibition places that argument back in the room, in physical prints rather than on screens.

The timing also suits Parr's institutional standing. Once the photographer critics loved to attack, he became a member of Magnum Photos in 1994 and later one of the most collected and exhibited documentarians of his generation. "Common Sense" sits at the pivot of that trajectory: the work that crystallized both the hostility and the devotion his career has provoked.

What made 'Common Sense' so confrontational?

The series amplified everything Parr's earlier books — "The Last Resort" (1986) among them — had been accused of. Where his New Brighton photographs of working-class holidaymakers drew fire for their apparent cruelty, "CommonSense" went further:

• Radical color saturation, achieved with flash and 35mm film stock, flattening and bruising every surface it touched;
• Extreme proximity, with subjects cropped so tightly that the frame reads as intrusion;
• A cumulative rhythm — image after image of consumption — that turns browsing itself into the subject.

Viewed in sequence, the photographs stop being about any single meal or souvenir and become a wall of appetite. That wall, and the discomfort of standing before it, is the exhibition's real object.

How does the rehang reframe the work?

Distance changes judgment. In the 1990s, viewers saw their own present in Parr's pictures and many felt mocked. Today the same images read partly as social history — a record of a specific late-century visual economy of leisure, food, and mass taste. Yet the series' edge has not dulled: the behaviors it isolates have not disappeared, only migrated to new platforms and new merchandise.

This double reading is what keeps "Common Sense" in circulation while gentler documentary projects of the same era fade. It is simultaneously period piece and mirror.

For a photographer whose reputation was built on provoking exactly this ambivalence, a renewed exhibition is not a retrospective courtesy. It is a second trial — and if the past 27 years are any guide, the verdict will again split the room.

Whether the current run travels beyond this showing, or expands into a larger Parr survey, will determine how much of the original controversy — and the affection that matched it — the work can still command.