As a child, I visited Blackpool, a seaside resort about an hour north of Liverpool. I don’t remember why—probably 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 the geology type, but a long stick of boiled sugar, pink on the outside, white on the inside, with black letters spelling “BLACKPOOL ROCK” running its entire length, wrapped in crinkly clear plastic. I didn’t like it much (too minty), but no matter, I bought quite a few sticks for my lucky friends.
Blackpool in the 1980s had the same vibe as New Brighton, the seaside town Martin Parr photographed in The Last Resort (1986), showing the working class on holiday—eating fish and chips, trying for a suntan (too cold and overcast), toes dipping in dirty water, discarded newspapers blowing in the wind. The cover photo of two children eating ice-cream cones is untidy. Most photographers—and most mothers, too—would have wiped the children’s faces and arranged their pose before taking this shot. Not Parr. He wanted the drips.
A Liverpool showing of these photographs was well received, but a show at the Serpentine in London was contentious. The objections came quickly. Parr—from Surrey and middle class—had not only photographed the Northern working class, but in color! Color was for advertising and fashion, not social documentary (monochrome portrayed their tragic dignity). Worse, Parr’s photographs did not flatter; most people wish to be remembered with their best foot forward, not mid-gesture. And that relentless flash attached to his camera, lighting everything with the same indifference! Combined with saturated film (like Agfa Ultra), it made for garish colors. Added to this exaggeration, Parr’s subjects had no power, no names, and no right of reply. How rude!
I am not as offended as those Londoners were. When I see The Last Resort, it is not an insult but a joy. These are my people. I am from Sheffield. We liked going to the seaside. We didn’t feel tragic—it was a grand day out, and yes, it included fish and chips. What else do you eat by the sea? Maybe it all looks slightly ridiculous, but this is the seaside. Isn’t that the point?
“All photographs are propaganda,” Parr said. “I am the antidote to propaganda.”
Though an antidote stops the harmful effect of poison, it is not neutral.
The poison, according to Parr, is so ubiquitous that we hardly notice—food on packaging that does not look like what’s in the packet; travel brochures that remove the crowds; family albums that show everyone happy. Smiling is also a form of propaganda—and boring. The antidote is to photograph the eating, not the meal. The crowd, not the monument. The drips.
Satire is Parr’s secret weapon, and the working class is not his target. His target is photographing what they have been sold—the act of consuming. His target widens with his subsequent books. His photographs exaggerate—a key element of satire.
The Cost of Living (1989) depicts Margaret Thatcher’s middle class—at garden parties, art viewings, private schools. I did not know this world. What I remember of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain is not prosperity, but the miners’ strike, the poll tax, the Falklands War, and the privatization of British Gas (especially the “Tell Sid” advertisements).
Small World (1996) is about mass tourism: tourists herded from one landmark to the next—the Acropolis, the Pyramids, the Grand Canyon. If you read this book, notice their cameras. Can we enjoy a place without taking a thousand photographs? Why do we live our lives through a screen? The photograph below reminds me of a joke: How many tourists does it take to hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Ask Parr.
In Common Sense (1999) and much of his work thereafter, including Real Food (2016), Parr exaggerates further, using a ring flash and macro lens—close enough that ordinary objects became slightly strange. And the crop—a mouth, a fork, a torso—turned bodies into fragments of behavior.
Luxury (2009) tackles over-the-top consumption and the super-rich—art fairs, race meetings, parties in Moscow, Dubai, Miami. The visuals include diamond jewelry, pedigree pups, racing cars, and empty champagne bottles. “Luxury is the new poverty,” said Parr. “For years, the subject of social documentary photography has been poverty, whereas I think that the new front line is luxury.”
In Parr’s work, timing matters most. He does not subscribe to the Henri Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment” philosophy. In the photography world, Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” is revered, unchallenged. In Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 book The Decisive Moment, he explains that pure visual harmony is that fraction of a second when all the elements in a photograph—geometry, composition, humanity—perfectly align. Most photographers I know are obsessed with this idea.
Not Parr. He wanted the discarded moment—the instant just before or after that decisive one. I admit that learning this about Parr shook my worldview a little. I had treated the decisive moment idea as a rule, not an opinion. As a rule-follower, I sometimes miss the obvious.
I had treated the decisive moment idea as a rule, not an opinion.
Who decides the rules? Rules are like culture—sets of morals, laws, customs, and beliefs we might not even notice until we step away. My move to the United States was my first step away from my British culture. New to Michigan, I recall standing alone in a grocery store, overcome by the strangeness of it all, and, unable to find tomato puree, having a little cry among the canned tomatoes (I later learned that Americans call it tomato paste; how odd.) On my way home, I observed but didn’t heed the tornado sirens, since I didn’t know what they meant, arriving home to find my anxious young husband alarmed that I hadn’t jumped into the nearest bath. Culture shock is real. Is there such a thing as rule shock?
In 1947, Cartier-Bresson and friends founded Magnum Photos, a cooperative that let photographers own and control their work. In 1988, Parr joined the agency as an associate. Six years later, he became a full member, though not without opposition, including from Cartier-Bresson himself. Parr scraped in, admitted by a single vote over the required two-thirds majority. In 2013, the group unanimously elected him president.
Opposites don’t always attract. Cartier-Bresson preferred natural light and called flash “impolite”; Parr loved flash. Cartier-Bresson disliked color and worked in black and white; Parr loved bright color. Cartier-Bresson preferred to go unnoticed (he even painted the chrome on his camera black); Parr worked uncomfortably close—no one could miss him. Cartier-Bresson wanted that decisive moment; Parr wanted the discarded. Cartier-Bresson dignified his subjects; Parr, at best, suspended judgment. Differences aside, they both photographed people—or the things people make.
In the mid-1990s, Cartier-Bresson saw a Parr exhibition in Paris and declared that Parr was from a different planet. Acknowledging the large gap between their work, Parr replied, “Why shoot the messenger?” The quarrel was short-lived; they reconciled over a lunch arranged by Cartier-Bresson’s wife, Martine Franck, also a Magnum photographer. In 2022–23, the Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris brought their work together in an exhibition, Cartier-Bresson with Martin Parr: Reconciliation, featuring fifty images by each photographer of northern England and its coast, including Blackpool.
Satirist and national treasure. That’s the verdict on Parr, who died in December 2025. The two seem incompatible, though in England they seldom are. England does not silence its satirists; it collects and absorbs them—a better alternative to censorship, requiring only that the joke be enjoyed, which it is. The National Portrait Gallery holds three portraits of Parr, seven of his photographs, and in 2019, gave him a solo show.
If Parr and I had been at Blackpool Beach at the same time way back when and our paths had crossed and he had photographed me—a kid consuming minty pink rock—would I have understood? If my photograph had appeared in one of his books, would I have been alarmed, or honored? Could I have absorbed the satire enough not to be a little hurt? My mind tells me it would have been an honor; my heart shrinks at the mortification. The jury is out.
Photographs by Martin Parr and Henri Cartier-Bresson are reproduced for the purposes of criticism and commentary; all rights remain with the photographers and Magnum Photos.