The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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Nothing is staged, so he needed to be careful about approaching subjects to avoid them becoming self-conscious. Parr’s work was focused, shot over three summers and, shortly after the show with Wood, published as a book, the seminal The Last Resort (1986). It’s very easy to look back and be nostalgic, thinking that everything was better in the ‘Good Old Days’. Known for his use of garish colours and esoteric composition, he has studied cultural peculiarities around the world from Japan to America, Europe, and his home country of Britain. The Last Resort is an unwavering series of photographs that featured the working-class seaside resort of New Brighton, situated in Merseyside, as the primary subject.

Here I would drive up to twenty miles or so to collect staff from their home villages and later, often into the early morning, take them back. The Last Resort is Martin Parr’s most iconic work, showing early colour photography shot around the seaside town of New Brighton from 1983 to 1985. The composition is primarily in red (the bench and pillar, the cola can, the butterflies on the little girl’s shoes), white (the chip wrappers, the woman’s eyelet top and the man’s shirt, the bag draped over the back of the pushchair) and blue (the woman’s trousers, the pushchair seat, the jeans worn by the man and child, cars parked in the background). 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.When he was a boy, his budding interest in the medium of photography was encouraged by his grandfather George Parr, himself a keen amateur photographer. The remaining holiday makers were mainly those who couldn’t afford the luxury of a fortnight in Benidorm or Magaluf. For some critics, his photographs seemed cruel and cold as they captured the working classes of people desperately trying to pursue their holiday adventures surrounded by pollution thanks to the consumer ridden society.

In this image he featured women in a beauty contest, bearing their bodies in swimwear and high heels, each holding a number and preparing to be scrutinised. 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. Often they would tease me mercilessly, doing all they could to embarrass me – they almost always succeeded. In a long essay on Parr, his friend and frequent collaborator Gerry Badger makes a significant point about the different receptions given to both The Last Resort and a near contemporary work, In Flagrante, by Chris Killip.As well as the day-glo outfits and cheap thrills of the arcades, Parr’s documentary-style approach draws attention to the ironies of a crumbling seaside resort. Coaches full of families and friends – all from the same town - would descend on Rhyl each Saturday morning. 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. vi] For Parr himself addressing different aspects of this issue, see the BBC documentary, The World According to Parr, also featuring the inevitable Saddam Hussein watches, Spice Girls memorabilia and much more besides. It is a deliberate clash of the old world and the new, their values opposed, and we are left in no doubt that one will cancel out the other – demolish it, in fact, with ‘ordinary’ people stranded uncertainly in the path of this inevitable collision. Mine was almost certainly different to Martin’s in that it was almost twenty years earlier – from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s. Parr printed eleven images from The Last Resort in a large-format edition of five for his 2002 retrospective at the Barbican Art Gallery, London.Secondly there’s the wider aim which helped Marshall get support for the project – the attempt to regenerate the area through the arts. Because Parr didn’t idealise the people and places he photographed, or showed them in ways that didn’t conform to the romantic understanding of the working-class as framed by the documentary tradition, it seemed to many that his attitude was the visual equivalent of Thatcherite disdain, sharing a laugh at the tacky pursuits of the little people whose days were assuredly numbered.

Even so, it’s fair to say that each photographer has seen the town differently and brought out different facets of its life, despite recording the same places, and sometimes even the same faces.Not a contempt for the people he portrayed but a contempt for a society that had allowed these places to be so ignored and discarded. Some critics understood Parr’s depiction of an area of economic deprivation and his focus on his subjects’ personal indulgences as a political statement decrying the excesses of Thatcherism. The beach has remained a fruitful testing ground simply because, “people are just lying there waiting to be photographed”.