A Different Planet

Two children eat ice creams on the cover of Martin Parr’s The Last Resort. Any other photographer would have wiped their faces first. Parr wanted the drips. Parr called himself the antidote to propaganda, and an antidote isn't the same as a kindness. He died in December 2025, a satirist and a national treasure at once. Somewhere in Blackpool in the 1970s, we might have crossed paths.

From Martin Parr’s The Last Resort (1986)

In my childhood—I don’t remember why—I visited Blackpool, a seaside resort about an hour north of Liverpool. What I do remember is that it was a day trip to the beach. I recall crowded pavements, penny arcades, postcards (some quite rude), a pier, and Blackpool rock. Not the music or geology type, but a long stick of boiled sugar, pink on the outside, the words “BLACKPOOL ROCK” running through its entire length, wrapped in crinkly clear plastic. I didn’t like it much (too minty), but that was beside the point, and I bought quite a few sticks for my lucky friends.

Blackpool in the early 1980s had the same vibe as New Brighton, a seaside destination closer to Liverpool, though New Brighton was the more rundown of the two, judging by Martin Parr’s The Last Resort (1986). It is a brightly colored photobook of the working class on holiday, eating fish and chips, trying for that elusive suntan (too cold), toes dipped in dirty water. The cover photo is of two children eating ice-cream cones. Most photographers—and probably most mothers too— would have wiped the children’s faces and arranged the pose when preparing for this shot. Not Parr. He wanted the drips.

A Liverpool showing of these photographs went well, but when the show reached the Serpentine in London, the floodgates opened.

Parr was a Southerner (from Surrey) and middle class by birth. Photographing the Northern working class was viewed as condescension. And in color! Color was the choice of advertising and fashion, not documentary. Tradition insisted that photographers working in socio-documentary—like Chris Killip and Tish Murtha—use black and white, which bestowed the downtrodden tragic dignity. Adding to the insult, Parr caught people mid-gesture and mid-chew—moments they would not have chosen. And his subjects were unnamed, unpaid, and unable to reply. And this was the era of Margaret Thatcher—not a Northern favorite.

I am not as offended as those Londoners. When I look at The Last Resort, I see not an insult, but joy. These are my people. I am from Sheffield. We liked going to the seaside. We didn’t feel tragic at all. It was a grand day out, and yes, it included fish and chips. What else do you eat by the sea? Maybe it is all slightly ridiculous, but then who isn’t when at the beach? That’s the point.

But the photographs also touch a nerve. No one (I suspect) wants to be memorialized quite like this. Most people, if given a choice, wish to be seen with their best foot forward. That isn’t Parr’s style. Remember the drips.

“All photographs are propaganda,” Parr said. “I am the antidote to propaganda.”

An antidote stops the harmful effect of poison; it is not necessarily neutral.

The poison, according to Parr, is so ubiquitous that we hardly notice. Food on the packaging does not look like the food in the packet; travel brochures remove all the crowds; family albums show everyone happy. Smiling, too, is a form of propaganda, and boring besides. The antidote is to photograph the eating, not the meal. The queue, not the monument. And the drips.

Satire is his secret weapon, and it reframes his photographs of New Brighton. He is not photographing working-class people. He is photographing what everyone has been sold, and catching them in the act of having bought it. This is his target, and it widens with subsequent books.

The Cost of Living (1989) depicts Margaret Thatcher’s middle class—at garden parties, private art viewings, and public schools. This is a world I did not know, though most of my growing-up years were under her. I saw the miners’ strike in Sheffield city center. I remember the poll tax, the Falklands War, the privatization of British Gas (“Tell Sid”).

Then came Small World, photographed between 1987 and 1994, about tourism, showing visitors being herded from one landmark to the next, cameras in hand. Which reminds me of the joke: how many tourists does it take to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Ask Parr.

From Martin Parr’s Small World (1994)

Luxury (2009) is about the super-rich—in Ascot, Moscow, Dubai. “Luxury is the new poverty,” said Parr. “For years, the subject of documentary social photography has been poverty, whereas I think that the new front line is luxury.”

Parr’s photographs exaggerate—a key element of satire. Flash in daylight flattens skin, hardens the background, and lights everything with the same indifference. Color was already an exaggeration, but saturated film (Agfa Ultra) pushed it further. Later, in Common Sense (1999), armed with a ring flash and a macro lens, Parr worked close enough that ordinary objects became slightly strange.

Then there was the cropping—a mouth, a fork, a torso, a sausage—which turned objects into fragments of behavior. And the timing: not Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment but the one either side of it, mid-blink, mid-adjustment. The discarded moment. Which was a complete revelation to me. The decisive moment—when all elements in a picture perfectly align—is the holy grail of photography. Why? I had never thought to question this “rule.”

Parr joined Magnum as an associate in 1988. Six years later, he became a full member, though not without controversy. Magnum is a cooperative for photographers, founded on humanist reportage by Cartier-Bresson and friends. Some said Parr did not fit. Philip Jones Griffiths opposed Parr, calling him “Margaret Thatcher’s favorite photographer” (she never said so) and the antithesis of everything Magnum stood for. Full membership required a two-thirds majority; Parr secured it by a single vote.

Later, around 1996 (Parr’s recollection), Cartier-Bresson wrote to Parr after seeing an exhibition of Parr’s work. Parr, he said, was “from a totally different planet.” Parr’s response? “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Who decides the rules? Parr broke Cartier-Bresson’s rule and quite a few others. I’m more of a rule follower, though arbitrary rules are annoying. My instinct is to be polite, complimentary, and composed. Sometimes I’m not even aware of it, like this “decisive moment” thing. I’m probably missing a whole lot of other good stuff, waiting for perfection. But I don’t want a mid-blink Parr picture. It’s not what I’m looking for. If I take one picture of a subject, I usually take a hundred frames, so I have plenty of options. Almost always, one is better than all the rest. This is my moment.

A still from the movie, I Am Martin Parr, released in 2025

A satirist and a national treasure. That’s the verdict on Parr, who died in December 2025. The two don’t necessarily align, except that this is what the English do: absorb the satire with good humor, then hang it in the National Portrait Gallery.

It turns out Parr went to Blackpool in his black-and-white days, before color. We might have crossed paths. If he had photographed me at the counter, handing over money for pink minty sugar I wouldn’t eat, for friends who didn’t want it either—could I have understood him? Forgiven him? Have I absorbed the satire enough not to be a little hurt?

I’m not sure.