The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

Product Information

The decline in visitor numbers, and the lack of spare cash that its few visitors had, meant that local councils were under impossible pressure as they tried to maintain public services particularly during the summer months.

In place of sandcastles, large pieces of haulage machinery loom, while towels placed on hard cement are the unhappy alternative to deckchairs. His new commission for the National Maritime Museum was displayed in The Great British Seaside exhibition.

In the 1980s The Last Resort was seen as an indictment of the market-led economic policies of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-90). CRB have also realeased a box-set of Parr’s zines which includes his work on the British seaside as well as Chinatown, Yates’, the abandoned Morris Minors of West Ireland, and Prestwich Mental Hospital. v] David Lee, Arts Review, August 1986, quoted in Val Williams, Martin Parr, Phaidon, 2002/2014, pg. Art critic David Lee wrote at the time “Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience. However, Parr maintains that his interest was not focussed on class discrepancies, but rather on the everyday truisms that we all experience, be it a screaming child or bad weather.

He studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic along with Peter Fraser, Brian Griffin, Daniel Meadows and Charlie Meecham. These photographs lay the groundworks for the iconic Parr series documenting the seaside town of New Brighton 'The Last Resort', which was taken from 1983 to 1985. While The Last Resort was interpreted by some as a cruel sociopolitical commentary, Parr claims that this was never his intention. My first was on the Fun Fair, alternating between the ‘one in the jar for a budgerigar’ stall and the ‘roll a penny’ stall. Coaches full of families and friends – all from the same town - would descend on Rhyl each Saturday morning.The most influential of Parr's publications and exhibitions, the series launched Parr's career internationally and heralded in a new era of social documentary photography in Britain. The series that first propelled him to success – his mid-80s documentary series The Last Resort – was an intimate freeze-frame of New Brighton, a time capsule of the holidays working class families during Thatcher’s reign. The ordinariness of the scene is undermined by the unintentionally comical location of the family on a patch of concrete right in front of a large piece of haulage machinery, possibly a crane. Between them the three photographers created a huge body of work on the seaside town, which is based just across the River Mersey from Liverpool in North England.

There is perhaps nothing quite so English – or British, if the distinction is still meaningful – as a day at the seaside. He painted his most famous work, Guernica (1937), in response to the Spanish Civil War; the totemic grisaille canvas remains a definitive work of anti-war art. Some saw it as a great achievement that helped set the standards for colored photography, while other critics saw it as an abnormality and a deviation from the norm. 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. Rather than golden sands, New Brighton is defined by concrete; in place of souvenirs, the town is dominated by large pieces of haulage machinery.This image (and the authority, the defiance – or maybe just simple irritation – of her look) is one of the major pivots of the work. It’s not a defined project but it’s really specific in a way – I see it differently because I grew up there,” he adds. He has developed an international reputation for his innovative imagery, his oblique approach to social documentary, and his input to photographic culture within the UK and abroad.

Martin Parr's classic book The Last Resort was first published in 1986 and is now available in this new edition with an introduction by Gerry Badger. A typical review of Last Resort stated that he found people “at their worst, greedily eating and drinking junk food and discarding containers and wrappers with an abandon likely to send a liberal conscience into paroxysms of sanctimony.

But third, there’s the fact of putting the images back into the context in which they were shot – in a venue with windows on all sides, which look out at the locations of some of the photographs.