What better time to pay a long overdue first visit to the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol than for an exhibition celebrating the late photographer's breakthrough series The Last Resort, 40 years after it first made an impact? The opportunity to see those images in the flesh, in the place that Parr himself set up to champion documentary photography of all shades, was too good to miss.
The exhibition opening was initially conceived as a two-hour event on Friday evening - but such was the enthusiasm and interest that the MPF turned it into a two-day affair, including guided tours and talks.
When I was there, on Saturday morning, MPF's Louis Little and Isaac Blease gave a practically full house an overview of the project's origins, defining characteristics, impact and afterlife, drawing attention to particular images on the gallery walls and offering interesting background information even for those of us who know the series well.
Little and Blease explained that Parr and his wife Susie moved to Merseyside from Ireland in 1982, and Parr began photographing New Brighton, a faded seaside resort, the following year. The approach and subject matter were inspired by the work of Tony Ray-Jones and particularly his book The English Seen, focusing on the nation at leisure, as well as the lurid picture postcards of John Hinde.
Parr's seismic shift from black and white to colour was prompted by the political climate of the time and a desire for his work to make a greater impact; with that shift, Little and Blease suggested, Parr went from celebrating culture to critiquing it. New Brighton was symbolic of the formerly grand seaside towns slowly dying due to political and economic neglect, changing leisure pursuits and the growing accessibility of foreign holidays.
Three observations about the images themselves were particularly illuminating.
First, Blease pointed out that Parr and his wife were at that time contemplating starting a family, which perhaps explains why so much attention is devoted to parent and child relationships and interactions - from toddlers on fairground rides to the baby swigging from a can of Coke.
Second, Little explained that the image that has become known as the Ice Cream Girl - in which an apparently overworked and disgruntled young employee stares straight down Parr's lens with a fierce defiance - was the result of a process called "going fishing", whereby Parr would identify a promising location and then play the waiting game. His contact sheets show that he often took several shots in the same spot, hoping that one might capture something special - no doubt a potentially expensive approach in the pre-digital era.
Third, in talking through Parr's choice of equipment, Little discussed saturation and the use of flash, which - in the picture of the children's beauty pageant at the lido - creates a slightly surreal effect. Looking more closely at that image, I was struck by the one girl who is deliberately touching her hair and preening for the judges. The way that she's knowingly playing at being an adult reminded me of the work of Clementine Schneidermann; little wonder Schneidermann's pictures have been exhibited at the MPF.
Parr's fondness for retaining records and ephemera proved enormously helpful when the exhibition was being prepared. The invitation to the original 1985 show at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool is on display in one of the vitrines, promising a Punch & Judy show and a specially commissioned stick of rock, and encouraging invitees to dress in beachwear or scuba gear. (Parr himself played along, pictured at the event in shorts, Hawaiian shirt and enormous sombrero.)
What I hadn't realised was that that initial exhibition was actually a joint show with another photographer, Tom Wood, though Parr went solo when the work was put on display at the Serpentine Gallery in London the following year. Blease touched briefly on the controversy it caused there, despite only being in situ for a week - a case of middle-class critics accusing Parr of patronising poverty tourism, taking offence on behalf of working-class Merseysiders who had seen the images and regarded them simply as depictions of reality.
Blease noted that this sensitivity arose in part because of growing concerns in the 1980s with the personal and political positionality of photographers, in terms of race and gender as well as class. Parr was himself rather uncomfortable with his role as a predatory figure taking pictures of people unaware, and indeed seems to have acknowledged this in the image of the adult beauty pageant contestants with a headless photographer in the foreground.
The catalogue/book produced to coincide with the exhibition contains a selection of images plus essays by Blease and the designer of the original book Peter Brawne, contact sheets and an afterword by Susie Parr, in which she reveals that Parr loved New Brighton so much that he asked for his ashes to be scattered there. He would have been pleased with the book and exhibition - a fitting testament to the project that really made his name.
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