The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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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. In the foreground, a man whose head is cropped out of the photograph can be seen, dressed in brown trousers and a pale shirt, standing with a camera hanging around his neck. The honesty and familiarity with which Parr shot his series quickly propelled him to success and granted him national fame. 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. Parr maintains that his interest was not in ‘class’ but in the truisms of everyday life that all people must deal with – such as screaming children and bad weather.

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.

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.

More recently, in her monograph on Parr, Val Williams has proposed a less political reading of the pictures. Largely funded through the Arts Council, Parr created a number of series and publications exploring English identity. A popular resort in the early 20th century, New Brighton’s fortunes had already started to fade by the 1960s, when most of the sand on its beaches disappeared because of tidal changes – as Parr pointed out in the introduction to his book The Last Resort (1986). 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. This image (and the authority, the defiance – or maybe just simple irritation – of her look) is one of the major pivots of the work.More broadly though, he never would again so unselfconsciously risk exposing himself to the accusation of exploiting his subjects in the way he was thought to be doing here. She has also curated exhibitions for institutions such as The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival. In a perverse fashion, the green ice-creams become part of the room’s furniture, appearing surreal and sinister, perhaps poisonous. By the late 1970s the days of the British Seaside holiday had all but ended – the annual week’s holiday had shifted increasingly towards daytrips.