The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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Wood’s lie somewhere in between – they can be “unflinching, there’s something quite tough about the way he sees things,” as Grant puts it, “but he still has a sensitivity towards people”. Described by some as cruel and voyeuristic, and by others as a stunning satire on the state of Britain, it established Parr as one of the world's most influential and admired photographers and revolutionised documentary photography in Britain. For some his camera seemed cold and cruel as it followed the working classes desperately pursuing their holiday dreams surrounded by dereliction and decay and wading through the apparently endless detritus of a pollution-ridden consumer society.

We had a lido very much like the New Brighton one, and the beaches were full of families with screaming babies trying to find somewhere to have a picnic. This image (and the authority, the defiance – or maybe just simple irritation – of her look) is one of the major pivots of the work. Much of his work has still not been printed, and it would take six months just to go through all the negatives, he says; he also has 700 hours of video. Martin is also working on a book about the History of Chinese Photobooks to be published by Aperture in 2015. This has ranged from New Brighton being the 6×7 medium format and changing from black and white to color.

This ‘cheery’ exterior is made possible through a bold use of color, which was partly inspired by the language of commercial photography and partly by American documentary photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. In the 1980s Parr was inspired by American colour photographers William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, and discarded monochrome for the popping colour photography he is now known for. His new commission for the National Maritime Museum was displayed in The Great British Seaside exhibition.

This could be any seaside resort in 1980's UK, and people that were born and lived through this time will be no doubt reminded of past holidays while viewing these vivid images. Bearing in mind the deteriorating social and economic conditions experienced by many during the course of the decade, some of the seafront settings take on a particularly brutalist look: an anonymous, largely empty paved area obscuring the view of the sea or a hard steep slope culminating in a flight of concrete stairs. After graduating from Manchester Polytechnic in 1973, Parr emerged onto the scene with a series of black and white photographs heavily inspired by the work of fellow British documentary photographer, Tony Ray-Jones. One of his later questions was about Martin Parr’s The Last Resort which I published in 1999 and have reprinted many times since. Less often cited, however, is how she continued, saying that, in its place there were “individual men and women and families.

Wood and Grant also shot people they knew, at least by sight, by virtue of having lived in the neighbourhood for so long; Wood shot compulsively, all the time – when he went on the bus, while he waited for the ferry, and when he went to the football or to the market.

If Parr’s subjects are most often unware of what he is able to see – and our potential to judge – they can still look back, confronting our gaze. In recent years, he has developed an interest in filmmaking, and has started to use his photography within different conventions, such as fashion and advertising. But interestingly, Parr explained that, “At the time, when I first showed it in Liverpool, no one batted an eyelid because everyone knew what New Brighton was like. Though Parr himself lived only a short distance from New Brighton he was, in no tangible sense, part of the world that he photographed and made no effort to be integrated into it – as, by contrast, Chris Killip often did with the people he photographed. Largely funded through the Arts Council, Parr created a number of series and publications exploring English identity.For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www. It would be too much to say he goes unseen, but in truth very few people seem to even notice him, despite the frequent use of electronic flash.

Hinde’s influence can also be seen in the tension between the idealistic and the grimy in Parr’s photography - particularly in the seaside settings. Secondly there’s the wider aim which helped Marshall get support for the project – the attempt to regenerate the area through the arts. In a similar way, how people relate to their surroundings is perhaps the real key to understanding this work. Though they didn’t shoot together, all three photographers knew each other and knew each others’ work, Grant and Wood sometimes showing each other their photographs and Grant studying under Parr at Farnham College, and Wood and Parr exhibiting their New Brighton pictures together at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool in 1986.

All that stuff can get in the way, whereas if you take pictures all the time, it’s no big deal because that’s what you do all the time. Parr’s off-kilter framing repeatedly emphasizes this point, as does the somewhat genteel, very English absurdity that he favours, such as with the well-known image of a woman sunbathing next to the tracks of a large earth-mover while a tweedy gent floats obliviously by in the background. Though controversial at the time, the photo series had something of a revolutionary effect in England, established a place for documentary photography in contemporary art and made Parr famous worldwide. To represent his perspective, he opted to capture his images in color, which was something quite different, unexpected and unique at the time.