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It’s been virtually a month since documentary photographer Martin Parr left us. He spent over 50 years capturing on a regular basis British life with saturated colours and a satirical eye, and leaves behind an infinite physique of labor. But Parr knew which images mattered most.
When requested about his legacy, he stated that when he reached the Pearly Gates, The Last Resort – his breakthrough sequence from 1986, capturing working-class holidaymakers at a rundown seaside resort – could be the primary he’d pull out. Now, following his dying, his eponymous Foundation is doing precisely that; placing these photos entrance and middle in a brand new exhibition.
Color heretic
This show isn’t just a memorial, though. Opening at the Martin Parr Foundation in February. It’s a reminder of how radically one man modified what documentary pictures might be… and the way lengthy it took for the institution to catch up.
His technical selections alone have been revolutionary. Parr used a Plaubel Makina W67 medium-format movie digital camera to shoot The Last Resort, and selected to work in shade when “serious” documentary photographers nonetheless labored in black and white. In the context of the time, this wasn’t simply an aesthetic determination; it was virtually heretical.
The new exhibition will show that very digital camera alongside contact sheets and ephemera, providing guests a uncommon glimpse into the working strategies behind photos which have influenced 1000’s. But the actual controversy wasn’t about shade movie. It was about class, who deserved to be photographed, and the way.
In 1983, having recently moved to the Merseyside town of Wallasey with his wife Susie, Parr started cycling the couple of miles to New Brighton, a Victorian seaside resort that had fallen on hard times. Where others might have documented decline with “sympathetic” monochrome, Parr deployed ring flash and saturated color to capture working-class holidaymakers eating chips, sunbathing on concrete, and making the best of things in Thatcher’s Britain.
The series featured highly saturated shots of beachgoers lit by lurid flash. The aesthetic borrowed from commercial photography and garish postcards; exactly the sort of visual language that “serious” photographers dismissed as vulgar.
And when The Last Resort opened at London’s Serpentine Gallery, critics were vicious. He was accused of being cruel, voyeuristic, patronising; a view that some people still hold to this very day. Yet Parr’s response was characteristically blunt: “Why shoot the messenger?”
What critics missed
Susie Parr’s recollection is telling: “When the show opened at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool in the winter of 1985, guests dressed appropriately, with rain hats, swimming costumes, lilos and Pac-a-Macs,” she says. “No one batted an eyelid at the images: that was what New Brighton was like.” In other words, while middle-class critics saw condescension, the working-class people of Liverpool simply saw themselves. Were the former, one wonders, in fact projecting their own class prejudice onto the pictures?
For photographers, there’s a lesson here about seeing versus judging. Parr’s macro lens put his subjects under the microscope, but my view is that he wasn’t dissecting them; he was getting close enough to see them clearly. The resulting images may feel uncomfortable to some, precisely because they’re honest; capturing people in unguarded moments without the flattering distance that “respectful” photography often maintains.
Today, when every documentary photographer works in color and intimate, flash-lit observations of everyday life have become commonplace, it’s easy to forget how radical this approach once was. The exhibition’s archival materials, including some of the postcards by Tony Ray-Jones and John Hinde’s that influenced Parr, will help today’s photographers understand the visual grammar he was building from.
Fitting tribute
The Last Resort wasn’t about poverty tourism or class condescension. It was about British resilience, about finding joy in imperfect circumstances, about the gap between the mythology of a traditional seaside holiday and the reality of concrete and litter. Parr found that gap fascinating, not contemptible.
And for Susie Parr today, the new exhibition is all a fitting tribute. “I do hope that as many people as possible will come to see the show,” she says. “It’s the best possible way we could open up again; truly a celebration of the extraordinary, the one-off Martin Parr.”
The Last Resort opens at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, UK, from February 20 – May 24, 2026. Entry is free.
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