A very special tribute to the late, great Martin Parr is going on display later this month at the Martin Parr Foundation, featuring images in a new exhibition depicting his iconic ‘80s snaps from New Brighton: work that Martin himself thought of as his ‘greatest achievement’.
An extraordinary exhibition of The Last Resort, the work which defined photographer Martin Parr’s career, will go on display at the Martin Parr Foundation (MPF) from 20 February until 24 May this year. In a very fitting statement, Martin Parr himself once said: “The pictures from The Last Resort still hold very well. When I get to the Pearly Gates, those are the ones I’d probably get out first!”, and this exhibition marks a change to the Foundation’s planned schedule to commemorate Martin following his death in December 2025, allowing visitors an opportunity to celebrate his remarkable talent.
Above left: Martin Parr contact sheet from The Last Resort © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos; above right: New Brighton, England, 1983-85 © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
The exhibition also coincides with the 40th anniversary of both the first edition of Martin’s book of The Last Resort, and the landmark Serpentine Gallery exhibition of the series in 1986. The book was initially self-published under Promenade Press before subsequent new editions and multiple reprints by Dewi Lewis Publishing. Before Martin’s death, he had been working on a new edition of the book with Dewi Lewis and had chosen a small selection of images he had previously overlooked from the series for inclusion.
Some of these images will be included in the exhibition alongside contextual information drawn from the Foundation’s archive.
“This exhibition allows us to reintroduce visitors to one of Martin’s seminal bodies of work,” explains Jenni Smith, director of MPF. “The Foundation felt it was important to mark Martin’s death whilst celebrating his remarkable career and legacy.”
“The shock of Martin’s sudden death together with the tributes pouring in from all round the world have caused me and the MPF team to review the programming for 2026,” notes his wife Susie Parr. “It feels important and appropriate that we open the foundation up in February with a show of The Last Resort, arguably Martin’s most celebrated work. He himself felt that The Last Resort was his greatest achievement”
New Brighton = new images
In 1983 Martin, who had recently moved to Wallasey with Susie, began to photograph New Brighton. The resort, on the northern tip of the Wirral peninsula in Merseyside, was just a couple of miles away from his new home. New Brighton had been developed in the 1830s to rival old Brighton in the south. By the time Martin visited, 150 years later, it was during a period of economic downturn and the resort was rundown, in disrepair and the streets were litter-strewn. In spite of this, the photographer encountered the fortitude and resilience of the British at leisure, making the best of the situation. He photographed in the snack bars, on concrete promenades, the Miss New Brighton Bathing Beauty contest and inside Wilkie’s covered fairground. The summers of 1983-1984 were also exceptionally hot and attracted large crowds which provided the perfect conditions for Martin.
In a departure from much of his previous work, Martin photographed New Brighton in colour. He had been inspired by both the language of commercial photography, and by Peter Mitchell in the UK and William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Joel Meyerowitz in the US. Both the subject matter of The Last Resort, seen by many as low-brow, and this departure from the black and white medium associated with documentary photography at the time led to a seismic shift, and a key moment both for Martin’s career and in documentary photography in the UK.
“Having been very fond of Martin’s more elegiac black and white work in Hebden Bridge and Ireland, the brash colour of his images was a shock,” says Susie. “But I could see that it was an extraordinary body of work. When the show opened at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool in the winter of 1985, guests dressed appropriately, with rain hats, swimming costumes, lilos and pac-a-macs. No one batted an eyelid at the images: that was what New Brighton was like. It is a well-documented fact that the response to the show at The Serpentine was rather different.”
Defying controversy
In 1985 the photographs Martin had taken in New Brighton were first exhibited as The Last Resort in a two-person show with Tom Wood at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool. The following year he self-published his book of the work and the project was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London. This exhibition proved controversial. Martin was berated for being patronising, cruel and voyeuristic. However, 40 years later, opinion has shifted and it is widely held that critics at the time projected their own class prejudice into the pictures. The value and importance of The Last Resort has been re-assessed and the photographs remain Martin’s best-known and most influential work. His engagement with and interest in the British at leisure was to occupy much of his following career.
“Martin kept objects and ephemera that traced both his personal life and the trajectory of his career,” explains Isaac Blease, curator at MPF. “We have been revisiting these materials within the MPF Collection to uncover previously untold stories, allowing a fuller picture of the series to emerge and illuminating the many factors that came together in the making of The Last Resort. This has included unearthing correspondences, snapshots, revisiting contact sheets, and even tracking down his iconic Plaubel Makina W67 camera. Alongside this archival research, we have been reconnecting with individuals involved in the project, from his wife Susie to collaborators such as Peter Brawne, whose original 1986 book design has been revisited for the exhibition.”
Susie and the rest of the team at MPF have expressed their hope that as many people as possible come to see the exhibition, especially after the foundation has been closed in the wake of Martin’s passing. In Susie’s own words: “It’s the best possible way we could open up again, truly a celebration of the extraordinary, the one-off Martin Parr.”
The Last Resort by Martin Parr opens 20 February at the Martin Parr Foundation (BS4 3AR) and runs until 24 May. The exhibition Dark Tales: Britain and Ireland Through a Gothic Lens was scheduled to open at the Martin Parr Foundation in January 2026. This exhibition has been postponed and will now open in September 2026.
martinparrfoundation.org
