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). Some critics understood Parr’s depiction of an area of economic deprivation and his focus on his subjects’ personal indulgences as a political statement decrying the excesses of Thatcherism. More recently, in her monograph on Parr, Val Williams has proposed a less political reading of the pictures. In her view, The Last Resort typifies Parr’s incisive eye for the eccentric. She has commented, ‘There’s no cynicism in Parr’s gaze, just interest, excitement and a real sense of the comedic’ (Williams, p.161). Parr himself has claimed, ‘I’m less interested in the fact that these people aren’t well off financially as in the fact that they have to deal with screaming kids, like anyone has to ... I’m also interested in making the photographs work on another level, showing how British society is decaying; how this once great society is falling apart’ (quoted in Williams, p.160).

In this image, a woman with heavily freckled shoulders is sunbathing face down on a white towel. Her face is turned away from the camera, and her red hair pinned with a series of plastic combs. Her young daughter crouches nearby, her pink swimsuit tied round her neck with a bright blue bow. She appears to be playing with a red plastic bucket. Other buckets and a spade lie in the foreground of the picture, denoting a family day out at the seaside. The ordinariness of the scene is undermined by the unintentionally comical location of the family on a patch of concrete right in front of a large piece of haulage machinery, possibly a crane. Huge tank-like wheels loom over the reclining figure.

The scene suggests a futuristic wasteland where families share beach space with industrial machinery, and this, as much as the flourescent colours of the toys, gives it a recognisably 1980s aesthetic: science-fiction films of the period conveyed a sense of post-industrial apocalyptic dread that this image seems to gently satirise. Here the machine is neither aggressive nor benign; it is simply part of the landscape.

Further reading
Martin Parr and Ian Walker, The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton, Stockport, 1986, reproduced no.40 in colour.
Val Williams, Martin Parr, London, 2002, reproduced p.195 in colour.

Rachel Taylor
September 2003