The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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The reaction against the work, however much it seems overblown now and to whatever extent it was at the time, actually prodded Parr to examine his own class, resulting in The Cost of Living and Sign of the Times. The Last Resort was one of Parr’s early experiments with color and in this way the beach has been his laboratory for testing out new ideas. One of his later questions was about Martin Parr’s The Last Resort which I published in 1999 and have reprinted many times since.

But Parr is also showing some of his earlier black-and-white photographs – images in which, says Marshall, “you can see his confidence grow as he gets older and goes much closer to faces”. But from funfairs to food to flower shows, nowhere is the pursuit of pleasure more nakedly apparent than on the beach. v] David Lee, Arts Review, August 1986, quoted in Val Williams, Martin Parr, Phaidon, 2002/2014, pg.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). Steering a risky course between impartiality and voyeurism, Parr observed the slowly decaying and crumbling town of New Brighton as well as the holidaymakers that frequented the town with a new and disturbing perspective. The exhibition takes its title from one of the most important twentieth century photography publications, Bill Brandt’s first book,. So then I started imagining looking at it all and showing it in New Brighton, and when I mentioned it to Ken he stopped and said ‘That’s a great idea!

Entertainment is at the heart of Parr’s photography and is especially evident in his work on the beach.

The story of that decline and what its trajectory reveals about the dynamics of post-war English life is the driving force behind Martin Parr’s project The Last Resort, a study of New Brighton, then a popular working-class destination just outside Liverpool, made between 1983 and 1985.