New book celebrates the photographs Martin Parr said would get him into heaven

British documentary photographer Martin Parr, who died in December aged 73, had no doubt which of his many thousands of images mattered most. He said, more than once, that when he reached the Pearly Gates, his 1986 photo series The Last Resort was what he'd pull out first.

The Martin Parr Foundation is now doing exactly that, with an exhibition in Bristol and an accompanying book that between them amount to the most thorough examination yet of the series that made him famous.

The exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation runs until 24 May, and entry is free. The book, The Last Resort: 40 Years On, ships on 26 February. Both deserve your attention.

What the book contains

At 60 pages and £30, this is a compact hardback, and it does something more interesting than simply reprinting the famous images. It excavates the project: how it came to be made, who influenced it, and what it meant to the people closest to it.

Isaac Blease, archivist at the Foundation, traces the background to Parr's move to Wallasey in the early 1980s, his decision to abandon black and white in favor of color, and the reception the work received when it first appeared; at Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery in 1985 and then at The Serpentine Gallery in London.

Peter Brawne, designer of the original 1986 book, discusses the design process and what it was like to work with Parr at that stage of his career. And Susie Parr, Martin's wife, contributes a short, lucid account of New Brighton as she actually experienced it, and of that first Liverpool opening.

This last piece is quietly revelatory. She describes opening-night guests arriving in rain hats and swimming costumes (dressing for the subject matter) and notes that nobody batted an eyelid at the images, because this was simply what New Brighton was like. The furore that followed in the London press was, in her telling, more about the critics than the photographs.

Why this matters

For photographers specifically, the historical context the book provides is genuinely useful. Parr shot The Last Resort on a Plaubel Makina W67 medium-format camera, using ring flash to achieve those lurid, flattened colors that borrowed the visual language of commercial photography and seaside postcards.

This was not naivety. It was a precise and provocative aesthetic decision, made at a time when "serious" documentary work meant black and white, available light and a respectful distance from the subject.

The archive materials — contact sheets, ephemera, evidence of the postcard collections by Tony Ray-Jones and John Hinde that influenced him — show a working photographer thinking carefully about visual language, not just pointing a camera at poverty and calling it art. Which was, of course, the charge. Critics accused him of condescension, voyeurism, class tourism. Parr's response was characteristically direct: why shoot the messenger?

What the book makes clear, looking back from 40 years' distance, is that the controversy was fundamentally about who deserved to be photographed and on whose terms. Parr's answer — everyone, on their own terms, in honest color — has since become so normal in documentary photography that it's easy to forget how radical it once felt.

A complex legacy

The contact sheets alone are worth the price of the book for anyone interested in how decisions get made in the field, how many frames surround the ones that become iconic, and how much craft underlies what looks like spontaneity.

The exhibition displays that same camera, alongside further ephemera, giving visitors a rare glimpse into the working method behind images that have influenced a generation.

Parr was rigorous about honesty, about proximity, about refusing to flatter. That requires just as much discipline as any formal studio approach. It just looks less like it from the outside, which was probably part of the point.

The book The Last Resort: 40 Years On is available from the Martin Parr Foundation for £30.

The exhibition is being held at the Martin Parr Foundation, Paintworks, 316, Arno's Vale, Bristol until 24 May 2026.