The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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His serious foray into colour continued his documentation of British life in a new way and his use of flash outdoors captured his subjects in action with crystalline precision. Inspired by African and Iberian art, he also contributed to the rise of Surrealism and Expressionism.

iv] In the conversation – and controversy – around Parr’s work, what exactly ‘class’ meant was often left tellingly undefined, as it is by necessity here. Parr printed eleven images from The Last Resort in a large-format edition of five for his 2002 retrospective at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. Shot over three seasons, Parr’s images focus on the gritty chaos of hot weekends and Bank Holidays in a seaside resort; Grant’s, by contrast, often show quieter moments of everyday life.In a long essay on Parr, his friend and frequent collaborator Gerry Badger makes a significant point about the different receptions given to both The Last Resort and a near contemporary work, In Flagrante, by Chris Killip. My first was on the Fun Fair, alternating between the ‘one in the jar for a budgerigar’ stall and the ‘roll a penny’ stall. But interestingly, Parr explained that, “At the time, when I first showed it in Liverpool, no one batted an eyelid because everyone knew what New Brighton was like. More broadly though, he never would again so unselfconsciously risk exposing himself to the accusation of exploiting his subjects in the way he was thought to be doing here. 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.

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.

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. Secondly there’s the wider aim which helped Marshall get support for the project – the attempt to regenerate the area through the arts. If anything, the satirical edge often attributed to his pictures found its most cutting expression here, exposing the pretensions of his subjects in ways that were, I would argue for the first time, genuinely – and deliberately – unflattering.