The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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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. To his critics the deliberate use of a direct, unflattering style signalled a view of the ‘working-class’ that, in its seemingly unvarnished cruelty, was of a piece with the political thinking that ruthlessly targeted the values and coherence of a whole culture. 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. In a similar way, how people relate to their surroundings is perhaps the real key to understanding this work.

In changeable weather, he spent a week leading up to the August Bank Holiday photographing the Essex coast: at Clacton-on-Sea, he captured a group of Hindu women commemorating the last day of the Holy month of Shravan, at Walton-on-the-Naze he found a sun-loving couple settling down in front of their beach hut trying to catch what rays they could and at Shoeburyness he snapped an elderly man taking gentle exercise on the promenade watched by a more reticent friend. He exhibited his first series of colour photographs in an exhibition entitled Home Sweet Home at the Impressions Gallery and has since gone on to become a pioneer of colour photography in Britain. Rather than golden sands, New Brighton is defined by concrete; in place of souvenirs, the town is dominated by large pieces of haulage machinery. Other jobs included those at the holiday camps which, even then, stretched out for miles along the coast. Critics understood the series as a political statement condemning the economic policies led by Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister at the time.His status is instead that of an observer and what seems to motivate these pictures time and again is the sheer pictorial vitality of his subjects, the wealth of detail and incident that he found there. In the foreground, a man whose head is cropped out of the photograph can be seen, dressed in brown trousers and a pale shirt, standing with a camera hanging around his neck. It was still the time of ‘wakes weeks’ when whole towns in the industrial heartlands of the North and the Midlands would close their factories and escape en masse to the seaside.

But even if, as Val Williams suggests, Last Resort was “an exercise in looking,” it still mattered who was looking at whom. This has ranged from New Brighton being the 6×7 medium format and changing from black and white to color. My parents are bird watchers so, growing up, I didn’t go to trashy seaside resorts,” reveals Parr, “we went more to look at Waders and Goldfinches. The local reaction was muted originally, it was only when it came to London and the intelligentsia started up,” he says.

Less often cited, however, is how she continued, saying that, in its place there were “individual men and women and families.

The photographs comprising The Last Resort were taken between 1983 and 1985, a period of economic decline in northwest England.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The wire mesh bin is overfilled with fish and chip wrappers and soft drink cans and overflowing debris litters the ground. 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. Nothing is staged, so he needed to be careful about approaching subjects to avoid them becoming self-conscious.