The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

Product Information

And in these same faces and gestures I see the same people that I remember so well from my days in Rhyl all those many years ago. My father was a local councilor at the time and I had many an argument with him about the state of the town. vii] This difference in ‘emphasis,’ a difference that Badger considers as much stylistic as anything else, meant that Killip’s work was not subjected to the same kind of criticism as Parr’s. That also meant my photographs looked a certain way, but I wanted to keep my costs low so I could work freely,” he adds.

So I was using outdated film because it was cheaper – outdated film and cine film, which I used to cut into sections myself. i] What I want to revisit here is, in the first instance, the work itself, but also some of the controversy that surrounded its initial release. 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.Rhyl in the 1960s was a bustling resort during the summer months, holidays abroad were still the province of the few, and most working people had to settle for a week by the British seaside. The honesty and familiarity with which Parr shot his series quickly propelled him to success and granted him national fame. Art critic David Lee wrote at the time “Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience. This 2008 edition of the book (originally published by Promenade Press in 1986) presents the original images alongside a new essay by Gerry Badger, examining how perception of this important piece of photography has changed over the decades since original publication.

Much of his work has still not been printed, and it would take six months just to go through all the negatives, he says; he also has 700 hours of video. Suddenly her idea “escalated to being part of the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, and part of the cultural strategy for 2018, and everyone was supporting it”, and when she found the sailing school, which is divided into three rooms, it seemed it was meant to be. 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. And there is certainly room for pathos as well, such as with the old couple lost in thought and mutual silence, waiting for their tea, in the poignant image that opens the book. 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”.

vii] Gerry Badger, Ruthless Courtesies: The Making of Martin Parr in The Pleasures of Good Photographs, Aperture, 2010, found here: http://www. When first exhibited in the Serpentine Gallery in 1986, The Last Resort caused public outcry and garnered widespread controversial attention. In honour of such a brilliant collaboration, we spoke to Parr to discover the story behind this legendary series. 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”. Parr is right in the action, looking directly at the crowd and the small dramas that make it up, from their midst.

The series of photographs is what helped to bring Martin Parr to broad public attention during the mid-1980s. 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. This is emphasised by the coordination between the ice-cream and the interior decoration, decked out in garish bluey-greens. The enchanting world of leisure is a central theme in these colourful works by Martin Parr (*1952, Epsom, GB).

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. This has ranged from New Brighton being the 6×7 medium format and changing from black and white to color.