Four decades ago, a man took lots of photos of some working-class people having a day out at the seaside. The resort was New Brighton on Merseyside, and the photos showed that the sun shone, the ice creams were runny and lots of people fell asleep in their deckchairs, resulting in their faces turning fire-engine red.
What ‘The Last Resort’ – the most famous photography project by Martin Parr, who died last month at the age of 73 – also showed, and continues to show, is that there is nothing that the liberal-artistic-media-elite loathe more than seeing ordinary people having a good time and not giving a hoot what anyone else might think of them. ‘This is a clammy, claustrophobic, nightmare world,’ wrote Robert Morris in the British Journal of Photography after viewing the pictures. ‘People lie knee-deep in chip papers, swim in polluted black pools and stare at a bleak horizon of urban dereliction.’ Other reviews were, if anything, less kind to the people depicted in Parr’s photographs.
How shocked you were, or perhaps still are, by the photos in ‘The Last Resort’ depends entirely on your more picayune senses. I grew up close to New Brighton in the 1980s and I can vividly remember visiting my dad at work in nearby Bootle and taking trips to this seaside town that had fallen on particularly hard times. Yes, there was litter, there was crumbling infrastructure, there were boarded-up shops and absolutely nobody had any money. But, as a kid, I didn’t notice too much of all that. I just remember the melted chocolate bars, the Victorian wind shelters and, of course, the Irish Sea beyond the sands: steepling hills of water that seemed to sparkle like rhinestones.
Parr took photographs of all of those things. And when his work debuted at the Serpentine Gallery in 1986, it made his name as one of the finest English photographers of the era. It also prompted the word ‘controversial’ to follow him for the rest of his career – a bromide seemingly based on nothing other than his reluctance to go down the Don McCullin or Bill Brandt route of always depicting working-class people in a condescendingly noble (read: oft misleading and unrealistic) way. Parr’s ‘vision’ was immediately branded as being one of appropriately sneering disgust at the lives and fashion choices of those great unwashed.
‘People lie knee-deep in chip papers, swim in polluted black pools and stare at a bleak horizon of urban dereliction’
Yet Parr never did become a McCullin type, keen to promote his work as having the gravitas of a Tolstoy novel. True, he did pick up more than a few honorary fellowships, and there was an excellent Arena documentary about him last year (which is still available on BBC iPlayer and well worth watching). But the man himself, with his incredibly gentle Surrey accent, held little truck with the media’s view of him as working-class piss-taker in chief. And more importantly, his photos never stoop to such cheap shots.
‘The Last Resort’ in particular is rich with hope, smiles and escape. There’s one picture of a girl in her late teens who is serving ice creams to a gaggle of semi-dressed children, wet from the swimming pool. She looks bored, as well she might. But she has a pout Bardot would kill for, while, all around her, children clutch their double scoops and give off the contented exhaustion that kids only take on towards the end of a wonderful day out.
New Brighton is utterly unkempt in Parr’s photographs. But if you’ve ever been to Glastonbury or Murray Mount at Wimbledon you’ll already know that making an absolutely foul mess in public places is far from a class issue.
I love Parr’s photography because it shows us something that Guardian readers find incredibly difficult to absorb – namely that, just because there’s litter, cheap clothing and a lack of ready cash, it doesn’t mean everyone present is necessarily ensconced in suicidal gloom and needs to be saved by membership to Your Party.
‘The Last Resort’ shows us unselfconscious hedonism, smiles, snarls and a lot of cheap yet lovely food. Its essence is nothing as hokey as the Blitz spirit: it’s showing life where the spirits come with mixers and where cars come with wet towels, damp children, hot seats and a spilled Cornetto in the footwell. That sounds like a life well lived to me. Martin Parr, you will be missed.
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