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British documentary photographer Martin Parr, who died in December aged 73, had little doubt which of his many hundreds of photographs mattered most. He stated, greater than as soon as, that when he reached the Pearly Gates, his 1986 photograph sequence The Last Resort was what he’d pull out first.
The Martin Parr Foundation is now doing precisely that, with an exhibition in Bristol and an accompanying e book that between them quantity to essentially the most thorough examination but of the sequence that made him well-known.
The exhibition on the Martin Parr Foundation runs till 24 May, and entry is free. The e book, The Last Resort: 40 Years On, ships on 26 February. Both deserve your consideration.
What the e book incorporates
At 60 pages and £30, it is a compact hardback, and it does one thing extra fascinating than merely reprinting the well-known photographs. It excavates the undertaking: the way it got here to be made, who influenced it, and what it meant to the folks closest to it.
Isaac Blease, archivist on the Foundation, traces the background to Parr’s transfer to Wallasey within the early Eighties, his resolution to desert black and white in favor of coloration, and the reception the work acquired when it first appeared; at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery in 1985 after which at The Serpentine Gallery in London.
Peter Brawne, designer of the original 1986 book, discusses the design process and what it was like to work with Parr at that stage of his career. And Susie Parr, Martin’s wife, contributes a short, lucid account of New Brighton as she actually experienced it, and of that first Liverpool opening.
This last piece is quietly revelatory. She describes opening-night guests arriving in rain hats and swimming costumes (dressing for the subject matter) and notes that nobody batted an eyelid at the images, because this was simply what New Brighton was like. The furore that followed in the London press was, in her telling, more about the critics than the photographs.
Why this matters
For photographers specifically, the historical context the book provides is genuinely useful. Parr shot The Last Resort on a Plaubel Makina W67 medium-format camera, using ring flash to achieve those lurid, flattened colors that borrowed the visual language of commercial photography and seaside postcards.
This was not naivety. It was a precise and provocative aesthetic decision, made at a time when “serious” documentary work meant black and white, available light and a respectful distance from the subject.
The archive materials — contact sheets, ephemera, evidence of the postcard collections by Tony Ray-Jones and John Hinde that influenced him — show a working photographer thinking carefully about visual language, not just pointing a camera at poverty and calling it art. Which was, of course, the charge. Critics accused him of condescension, voyeurism, class tourism. Parr’s response was characteristically direct: why shoot the messenger?
What the book makes clear, looking back from 40 years’ distance, is that the controversy was fundamentally about who deserved to be photographed and on whose terms. Parr’s answer — everyone, on their own terms, in honest color — has since become so normal in documentary photography that it’s easy to forget how radical it once felt.
A complex legacy
The contact sheets alone are worth the price of the book for anyone interested in how decisions get made in the field, how many frames surround the ones that become iconic, and how much craft underlies what looks like spontaneity.
The exhibition displays that same camera, alongside further ephemera, giving visitors a rare glimpse into the working method behind images that have influenced a generation.
Parr was rigorous about honesty, about proximity, about refusing to flatter. That requires just as much discipline as any formal studio approach. It just looks less like it from the outside, which was probably part of the point.
The book The Last Resort: 40 Years On is available from the Martin Parr Foundation for £30.
The exhibition is being held on the Martin Parr Foundation, Paintworks, 316, Arno’s Vale, Bristol till 24 May 2026.
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