To honour Martin Parr following his death last December, the Martin Parr Foundation gallery will re-open in 2026 with an exhibition of Martin’s iconic series, The Last Resort. Shot around the English seaside town of New Brighton between 1983 and 1985, The Last Resort was one of the pioneering bodies of work driving British colour documentary photography and established Martin as one of Britain’s most influential photographers.
The Last Resort exhibition will include the full set of photographs from the original photobook, first published in 1986 by Martin under Promenade Press; this new show coincides with the 40th anniversary of both the publication and the landmark exhibition at Serpentine gallery, London. Exhibition prints will be on display alongside ephemera, including contact sheets, materials that influenced Martin at the time of making the work, and the original Plaubel Makina 67 camera Martin used, as well as a selection of photographs not included in the original book.
Across the 20 and 21 February the Foundation will host a series of talks and curator tours to commemorate Martin's legacy and the exhibition. A new book of The Last Resort published by Dewi Lewis will also be published.
Michael Pritchard writes... For a generation, or almost three, who missed the original exhibition of Martin Parr’s The Last Resort at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1986 it’s hard to overstate the impact and controversy the show engendered, there and at subsequent showings.
Of course, prior to 1986 Martin was well known. He had shown his black and white work in many exhibitions in Britain, starting with shows at Impressions Gallery, then in York. His work up to The Last Resort was good but traditional documentary in style, although usually with an understated humour and Martin’s distinctive eye for a picture. That work remains powerful if under appreciated.
The Last Resort was a marked change of direction in Martin’s approach: through its use of saturated colour, daylight flash, and as Martin noted in an interview with William Bishop, he redefined himself away from being a documentary photographer which, he said, ‘has many problems attached to it’, continuing ‘I’m getting less interested in describing a place and more interested in describing my own feelings’. That was why The Last Resort and his previous project Bad Weather came with no captions: ‘This is a clue to the viewer that it is less about New Brighton than it is about my feelings about New Brighton’.
The accompanying book Martin published himself with some support from the Arts Council and, as he noted ‘a large amount of my own money’. He employed a journalist, Ian Walker, to write the text and a designer, Peter Brawne.
And what of that critical reaction? Liz Wells said the work left her ‘uneasy’ and she noted on her second visit that one member of the public liked the work ‘because it is lurid’ and another found it ‘grotesque’. It was the latter that echoed her own view. She employed adjectives that were regularly used by other critics to describe the work: ‘unsympathetic’, ‘patronising’, ‘unpleasant’ and ‘unkind’. Wells did acknowledge that the work’s authenticity was clear but considered it closer to the comic postcard than the pictorial postcard. I suspect Martin might not have been too upset with that comparison. The word pictorial, if nothing else would have been a red flag to him!
A contemporary review by Robert Morris of the exhibition’s accompanying book praised Walker’s essay as ‘entertaining and informative’ but described Martin’s photography as ‘grotesque’ (that word again), ‘unflinching’ and ‘savage’. Morris also noted that Martin no longer wanted his photographs to be a celebration of life, but wanted them to express the angst with which he viewed the world. But I think Morris also identified the crux of the exhibition when he said ‘Parr wants us to see the people as metaphors for the state of contemporary British society’. Taking the pictures at face value was missing their point.
While the critics were out in force there were also supporters of Martin’s work. Fay Godwin, herself a significant photographer, wrote a letter in response to Wells’s piece posing the question ‘why should photography be kind?’ She expressed astonishment that anyone should suggest art ought to be kind and described The Last Resort as ‘one of the most powerful sets of pictures to emerge in this country in the last few years’. She considered the pictures ‘wonderfully ironic, but not lacking in concern’. As Martin had intimated, she considered them ‘more symbolic… both real and yet surreal’.
Martin told Bishop that he intended to move back down South and photograph in a much more middle-class situation. He said: ‘If I look at the last ten years of British documentary work, I don’t think it tells me as much as I’d like to known about what state British society is in; and the fact that this country feels so much more selfish and a much more uncaring society, manifests itself as much in the middle-classes as it does in the oppressed North.’ He followed through on that move.
Morris questioned whether The Last Resort is ‘an uncharacteristic aberration or the production in transition, heading for visions darker still’ and Godwin awaited ‘with fascinated dread his exploration of the middle classes’.
Forty years on The Last Resort may not raise the extreme reactions it did in 1986. British society has changed dramatically and is now ‘darker’ as Morris suggested. Martin’s pioneering approach has been widely copied by other photographers, although very rarely have they had the same way of observing people and their activities, or impact, and none ever kept up with Martin Parr’s evolving ways of seeing.
Dr Michael Pritchard
The Last Resort. 40 Years On
20 February- 24 May 2026, Thursday-Sunday, 1000-1800
Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol
See details of the exhibition and events on the 20th and 21st
Read BPH's obituary of Martin Parr CBE here
Image: New Brighton, England, 1983-85 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
