The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

Product Information

To his critics the deliberate use of a direct, unflattering style signalled a view of the ‘working-class’ that, in its seemingly unvarnished cruelty, was of a piece with the political thinking that ruthlessly targeted the values and coherence of a whole culture. She has commented, ‘There’s no cynicism in Parr’s gaze, just interest, excitement and a real sense of the comedic’ (Williams, p. 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. 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. The Last Resort is a series of forty photographs taken in New Brighton, a beach suburb of Liverpool.

Robert Morris said in The British Journal of Photography that “this is a clammy, claustrophobic nightmare world where people lie knee-deep in chip papers, swim in polluted black pools, and stare at a bleak horizon of urban dereliction.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. The photographs are part of a series of forty entitled The Last Resort, in which Parr captured sunbathers, fun seekers and diners at New Brighton, the Liverpool beach resort. In 1994, Parr became a member of Magnum Photographic Corporation and in 2002, the Barbican in conjunction with the The National Media Museum, initiated a retrospective of Parr's career to date, which toured for the next 5 years. Whenever I have a new technique I want to explore, I often would first do that on the beach,’ he says.

The finished Poster will then be sealed using archival paper backing, wired ready for hanging and with wall-friendly footers. He went on day trips to New Brighton as a child, and then again, in a different way, as a teen, he says; after leaving school he worked as a carpenter and lived in a “rough” area in Liverpool so, when he got the chance to move to New Brighton, after winning a grant to pursue his photography, he had a sense of moving to “the edge of the world”. This is emphasised by the coordination between the ice-cream and the interior decoration, decked out in garish bluey-greens. 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.

This title brings together early Martin Parr photography taken across British seaside resorts from 1970 to 1982. There is in these pictures a human complexity that belies whatever simplistic ideas we – and their initial audience – might want to impose on the lives (or moments from lives, really) that are being shown.