The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton

Product Information

In their isolated enclave, picked out with the bright synthetic colours of the buckets and a discarded pair of red jelly shoes, they seem oblivious to the comedy of their situation.

Often they would tease me mercilessly, doing all they could to embarrass me – they almost always succeeded.Critics understood the series as a political statement condemning the economic policies led by Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister at the time.

They were always friendly, talked endlessly, asking about me - just as I asked about them and their lives. There is perhaps nothing quite so English – or British, if the distinction is still meaningful – as a day at the seaside. Suddenly her idea “escalated to being part of the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, and part of the cultural strategy for 2018, and everyone was supporting it”, and when she found the sailing school, which is divided into three rooms, it seemed it was meant to be.To represent his perspective, he opted to capture his images in color, which was something quite different, unexpected and unique at the time. And because I was always doing pictures, going to the same places year after year, I became part of the scenery. This ‘cheery’ exterior is made possible through a bold use of color, which was partly inspired by the language of commercial photography and partly by American documentary photographers such as Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. New Brighton Revisited is open from 14 July – 25 August at The Sailing School, Marine Point, New Brighton www.

In the 1980s The Last Resort was seen as an indictment of the market-led economic policies of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979-90). The beach has remained a fruitful testing ground simply because, “people are just lying there waiting to be photographed”. The wire mesh bin is overfilled with fish and chip wrappers and soft drink cans and overflowing debris litters the ground.

We had a lido very much like the New Brighton one, and the beaches were full of families with screaming babies trying to find somewhere to have a picnic. In the 1970s when Parr started, photographers who wanted to be taken seriously and have their work displayed in museums needed to work in black and white, he told TIME magazine. So I was using outdated film because it was cheaper – outdated film and cine film, which I used to cut into sections myself.