The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

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Other buckets and a spade lie in the foreground of the picture, denoting a family day out at the seaside.

Then the use of the standard lens—initially at a wide angle—then the macro lens and then more recently the telephoto lens. Grant is showing finely toned black-and-white images in New Brighton Revisited; Parr is showing some of the iconic images from The Last Resort, which set the tone for his whole career – and arguably changed the course of British documentary photography – by using saturated colour and a flash. Parr shot The Last Resort in colour, departing from the traditional black and white medium traditionally associated with fine art photography. In fact, what Parr captured was working class reality; there is nothing innately simple or conformist about his characters, they are just portrayed as is. Much of his work has still not been printed, and it would take six months just to go through all the negatives, he says; he also has 700 hours of video.

Gesture is equally important in these pictures as a marker of different social roles and how they might be perceived. For all other purposes, such as display in public spaces or institutions, publishing the image online or in print, or any other form of usage, permission must be granted by Magnum Photos. And using the sailing school as a venue could help the town in a more immediate way too – this show is its first outing as a cultural venue, but the hope is that more could follow. The Last Resort is Martin Parr’s most iconic work, showing early colour photography shot around the seaside town of New Brighton from 1983 to 1985. Thatcher’s effect on the social, as opposed to the merely economic aspects of English life, see Tony Judt, Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945, Vintage, 2010, pgs.

Even the words ‘Last Resort’ were forbidden after the book – it’s the end of the Bank Holiday, all that litter,” she adds.

That also meant my photographs looked a certain way, but I wanted to keep my costs low so I could work freely,” he adds.