From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
As you sip, pose and enjoy the perfect end-of-day drink, you’re continuing a tradition that can be traced back, in part, to Gaspare Campari, who, in the 1860s, added to the ritual of cocktail drinking by inventing the original Milano-Torino.
For more than a century, some of the world’s most important photographers, from Robert Capa and Elliott Erwitt to Ferdinando Scianna and Eve Arnold, have immortalised scenes that depict cocktails being enjoyed, capturing moments of glamour in bars in their photographs. All of them, incidentally, were part of the storied photographic cooperative Magnum.
Many such photos are held in the Galleria Campari archive, established in 2010, in Campari’s headquarters in Sesto San Giovanni near Milan. It is a collection that contains adverts, artworks, memorabilia, posters and ephemera as well as photographs. As a whole, it documents the history and cultural significance of Campari.
The photographs of smiling bartenders holding their cobbler shakers, football fans with bottles, office workers sipping from tumblers, demure ladies dressed in flounces and jewels, and lovers locking eyes and clinking glasses show the performance and theatricality of drinking that today might seem like a lost world but is also strangely eternal. It is as though they bring to life the idea of philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, or the point where an ‘embodied history’ is ‘internalised as second nature’ to the point where it is ‘forgotten as history’.
Martin Parr, the great chronicler of British society, recently curated an exhibition of works from the Campari archives and included some of his own photographs and other Magnum photographers in the display. ‘Bar Stories on Camera’ was both brand history and a record of the evolution of contemporary society.
In addition to his professional work, Parr has been photographing people at leisure since the start of his career. One of the earliest such photos in his selection is a scene taken in Manchester in 1973, when he was a student. It features a couple dancing to a small band on stage while other revellers char or bop around. ‘I studied photography in Manchester, so that’s a downtown bar near Canal Street,’ he said of the shot’s location. ‘I can’t remember the exact place, but I used to go out there, in the evening, and just take my camera with me.’
Romans enjoying a well-earned drink in the wake of the divorce law referendum that took place in May 1974, photographed by Leonard Freed. © Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos
Also among Parr’s selection was a photo by Leonard Freed taken in Rome on 12 May 1974. It shows people of all ages sitting at bar tables with protest documents strewn across the floor. ‘[The images are] all coming together under the theme of bars, of course, and this is about Campari, so you see Campari being advertised,’ Parr explains. ‘But this one is from the day that divorce became legal in Italy: it’s on the headline of a newspaper.’ What might have been a simple advertisement for the cocktail brand becomes intertwined with a moment of social history.
What makes a good bar for Parr? ‘Some bars just work. You walk in, and you can tell – this is a good bar,’ he says. The Floridita Bar in Havana appeared in the exhibition. A couple of tourists are taking a selfie on a phone with daiquiris in hand. Other drinkers in shorts, Hawaiian shirts and cheap hats are clearly tourists. The bartender pours cocktails in front of a mock neoclassical mural. ‘It’s a good bar, despite the tourist crowd. And, of course, they’re on the Hemingway tourist map, which helps bring in the income.’ It looks to me like a bar temple with an altar to Hemingway. ‘A good bar has that ritualistic feeling,’ Parr says.
Rituals are transformative, but in a bar, they are also disruptive and transgressive, given the presence of alcohol. Another Parr photo captures people dancing in a British pub: a masked, rotund man is embraced by a woman between peanut bags and tap handles. ‘Spontaneous scenes like this are unique,’ Parr says. However, he also admits to taking ‘a lot of bad pictures’. He continues: ‘to confess, in order to take a good picture, you can’t be scared of taking bad ones. So it’s all about going through the motions.’
Many artists these days do not go out any more, but Parr still visits bars. One of his favourites is near Fetter Lane in London, about which this author is sworn to secrecy. Whether it is for research, for observation, or just for a pint, Parr is ‘still out there – still enjoying it.’ As he says, ‘You take pictures, hope for the right moment, and sometimes it just clicks into place.’
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.