This is emphasised by the coordination between the ice-cream and the interior decoration, decked out in garish bluey-greens. 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. It’s not a defined project but it’s really specific in a way – I see it differently because I grew up there,” he adds. Hinde’s influence can also be seen in the tension between the idealistic and the grimy in Parr’s photography - particularly in the seaside settings. Colour photograph of three blonde women, wearing swimming costumes and high heels, and holding rosettes, lining up to emerge from a white tunnel.

His now characteristic use of saturated color and on-board flash illuminated a country in a state of decay, but still finding pleasure where it could. When Parr’s photography book was published, released and exhibited back in 1986, it was so prolific that it divided both critics and audiences with dissenting opinions.Wood’s photographs are also (mostly) colour, but he uses a distinctive pastel palette which, perhaps, helps add the softness to his “toughness”. The wire mesh bin is overfilled with fish and chip wrappers and soft drink cans and overflowing debris litters the ground. Whenever I’ve adopted a new technique, I usually apply it first to the beach to experiment with what’s possible,” says Parr. The compositions were strong, well-executed in terms of framing and featured a wonderful color aesthetic, which was made even more beautiful by using the flash during the day. Critics condemned the work as cruel and voyeuristic but, as Parr says; “ I realised pretty early on that controversy didn’t do you any harm.

Less often cited, however, is how she continued, saying that, in its place there were “individual men and women and families. The Plaubel Makina rangefinder was also a lot lighter and more compact than the 35mm camera that he was utilizing initially. From a young baby guzzling a can of coke, to fish-and-chip wrappers strewn across concrete, and of course, the slurping sweet stickiness of ice-cream. But even if, as Val Williams suggests, Last Resort was “an exercise in looking,” it still mattered who was looking at whom.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. Though Parr himself lived only a short distance from New Brighton he was, in no tangible sense, part of the world that he photographed and made no effort to be integrated into it – as, by contrast, Chris Killip often did with the people he photographed. Mine was almost certainly different to Martin’s in that it was almost twenty years earlier – from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s. The Last Resort is a series of photographs taken by Martin Parr between 1983 and 1985 in New Brighton, a coastal suburb of Liverpool. Indeed, references of food remain subtly ingrained throughout Martin Parr’s series The Last Resort (1983-1985).

And Marshall’s words raise another moot point, which is what staging this show in New Brighton could mean for the town and its people. 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. Steering a risky course between impartiality and voyeurism, Parr observed the slowly decaying and crumbling town of New Brighton as well as the holidaymakers that frequented the town with a new and disturbing perspective. 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. 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.This image (and the authority, the defiance – or maybe just simple irritation – of her look) is one of the major pivots of the work. The contradictions of British life are everywhere to be seen – the beach is no different,” says Parr. By the late 1970s the days of the British Seaside holiday had all but ended – the annual week’s holiday had shifted increasingly towards daytrips. There is perhaps nothing quite so English – or British, if the distinction is still meaningful – as a day at the seaside. The relationship between the elements in each picture and the space they occupy is important, of course visually, but even more than that, in terms of what it tells us about the world Parr wants to depict.

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. Parr’s off-kilter framing repeatedly emphasizes this point, as does the somewhat genteel, very English absurdity that he favours, such as with the well-known image of a woman sunbathing next to the tracks of a large earth-mover while a tweedy gent floats obliviously by in the background.

He has curated several exhibitions and his work is collected by MoMA, New York, Tate Modern, London, the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Museum Folkwang, Essen, among many others. And because I was always doing pictures, going to the same places year after year, I became part of the scenery. 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. Martin Parr’s unmistakable eye for the quirks of ordinary life has made him a distinctive voice in visual culture for more than 30 years.