The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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More recently Martin has been working on a 4-year project documenting the Black Country, an area of the English West Midlands, in conjunction with Multistory.

I was very conscious not to put too many litter ones in, I wanted to respect the fact that the town had let me in. 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. Dating from the years 1983 to 1985, the scenes of English working-class people taking a break at the seaside display the bright, saturated colours that have become a hallmark of the British photographer’s work.

Passing my driving test shortly after my 17th birthday was what eventually changed my job prospects to more money and less unpleasant duties. By the time Tom Wood had arrived the pier had just been demolished, and by the 1990s, when Grant arrived, the advent of cheap flights had encouraged British holiday makers to seek out warmer climes. His now characteristic use of saturated color and on-board flash illuminated a country in a state of decay, but still finding pleasure where it could.

What this suggests, however, is that the arguments levelled against The Last Resort were based as much on some idea about ‘class’ as the lived reality of it. 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. 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. The show exhibited Parr's own collection of objects, postcards, his personal photography collection of both British and International artists, photo books and finally his own photographs.Parr shot The Last Resort in colour, departing from the traditional black and white medium traditionally associated with fine art photography. This image (and the authority, the defiance – or maybe just simple irritation – of her look) is one of the major pivots of the work. He says it’s partly inspired by the photographs he saw when he was starting out, which – because it was the 1970s and both photobooks and photography exhibitions were scarce – were snapshots and postcards rather than documentary photography, printed in colour but faded with time.

And the three photographers’ images are different in other ways too, most obviously in the way they’re shot. It was, indeed, the working-class experiences which shocked the London art scene, who were accustomed to the divisive separation that 80s Conservatism bred.Martin is also working on a book about the History of Chinese Photobooks to be published by Aperture in 2015. It seems to me, however, that style is only part of the answer, though there is no doubt that Parr fusing the aesthetics of American colour photography to ‘documentary’ subjects was, in its own way, radical. More recently, in her monograph on Parr, Val Williams has proposed a less political reading of the pictures. The abundance of rubbish that most commentators noticed, the overall shabbiness of the place, its air of neglect, is contrasted to people simply getting on and trying to enjoy themselves, taking whatever leisure they can find, despite the fact that they have increasingly been pushed to the margins.

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? The series of photographs is what helped to bring Martin Parr to broad public attention during the mid-1980s. 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. Steering a perilous course between objectivity and voyeurism, Parr viewed the decaying holiday resort of New Brighton and its holidaymakers in a way that was new, unique and deeply disturbing. I was surprised how much David focussed on my early life and in particular on how I’d been brought up in the seaside resort of Rhyl on the North Wales coast.The remaining holiday makers were mainly those who couldn’t afford the luxury of a fortnight in Benidorm or Magaluf.