The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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Rather than golden sands, New Brighton is defined by concrete; in place of souvenirs, the town is dominated by large pieces of haulage machinery. His book Looking for Love was in every hairdresser’s in the area, he says, and the only negative comment he got was “remind me not to kiss in public”. Indeed, references of food remain subtly ingrained throughout Martin Parr’s series The Last Resort (1983-1985). And the three photographers’ images are different in other ways too, most obviously in the way they’re shot.

But third, there’s the fact of putting the images back into the context in which they were shot – in a venue with windows on all sides, which look out at the locations of some of the photographs. Combined with the use of daylight flash, the series became, in Parr’s own words’ ‘hyper real’, illuminating Britain in a state of simultaneous decay and amusement. Despite these 19 th Century origins, however, the real heyday of the resort destinations surely belongs to the few decades after the Second World War that saw the height of their popularity and sharply declining thereafter, for a host of reasons linked to broader social shifts, not the least of which was the increasing availability of cheap package holidays abroad. The Last Resort, an unflinching series of photographs of the working-class seaside resort of New Brighton in Merseyside, brought Martin Parr to wide public attention in the mid-1980s.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.

They are, of course, very different, but despite Killip’s apparent closeness to the tenets of the documentary tradition, Badger is surely right when he suggests that only a “difference in emphasis” separates them as “fiercely independent, individualistic photographers,” that is, precisely not as exemplars of a tradition, but artists producing statements that reflected how they themselves saw the world, something Killip indicated by describing his landmark book as “a fiction about metaphor. Bearing in mind the deteriorating social and economic conditions experienced by many during the course of the decade, some of the seafront settings take on a particularly brutalist look: an anonymous, largely empty paved area obscuring the view of the sea or a hard steep slope culminating in a flight of concrete stairs. The rest of the group buzz with an uncontained energy, their faces red and sweaty, their gnawing stomachs aching for satiation.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The ordinariness of the scene is undermined by the unintentionally comical location of the family on a patch of concrete right in front of a large piece of haulage machinery, possibly a crane.

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. There is a certain edginess about these images, which could be said to capture the zeitgeist of 1980s England.

As a freelancer, she has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, Aperture, FOAM, Aesthetica and Apollo.

In place of sandcastles, large pieces of haulage machinery loom, while towels placed on hard cement are the unhappy alternative to deckchairs.This appraisal of the eccentricities of British society may be easy to romanticise, but The Last Resort is far from nostalgic. Some saw it as a great achievement that helped set the standards for colored photography, while other critics saw it as an abnormality and a deviation from the norm. After all, working-class culture was widely noted, if with some condescension, for its vibrancy, so to say that Parr was immersed – fleetingly, it’s true – in one aspect of that culture, it is surely because he saw an expression of something that had once been valued and was now under threat, increasingly degraded by a process that found a distinctive expression here.