What struck me about the British photographer Martin Parr wasn’t just his characteristic humour but the way he seemed to observe himself as closely as he observed everyone and everything else. When I met him for a piece that would be published on It’s Nice That, he was able to joke about his own death, the preservation of his archive and how the Martin Parr Foundation would outlive him, hinting at how he had already begun shaping how his legacy would be read.
That self-awareness runs through a career spanning more than five decades, from the windswept promenades of New Brighton in The Last Resort to the crowded piazzas of Venice and the selfie-saturated streets of Barcelona. His photographs are often discussed through the people within them, as curator Val Williams observed in her book on Parr – he “photographed the British awkwardness about themselves” and showed people in a way, “which both delights and terrifies critics… greasy‑fingered, tabloid‑reading people who eat in their cars, who shout and brawl.” Yet Parr was never simply photographing individuals, he was also photographing the social codes and visual systems that structured their behaviour – the built environments, objects, interiors and signage that shape how we consume, travel and interact.
Born in the comfortable Surrey suburb of Epsom in 1952, Parr grew up in the small towns of Chessington and Ashtead, which meant long Sunday walks and birdwatching with his parents. His first encounter with photography came from his grandfather, George Parr, a keen amateur photographer and member of the Royal Photographic Society who, around the age of 14, gave him his camera and encouraged his curiosity. By his teens, Parr had already decided he wanted to be a documentary photographer. He encountered the work of Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier‑Bresson and other modernists in Sylvester Stein’s magazine Creative Camera and saw formative exhibitions at London’s Hayward Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum that gave him an insight into photography as a serious cultural practice. Despite struggling academically, Parr enrolled at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester School of Art) from 1970 to 1973, where – alongside peers Brian Griffin and Daniel Meadows – he began to formalise his visual language. He combined documentary scrutiny with a fascination for everyday aesthetics. As a student, he worked briefly as a roving photographer at Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey, North Yorkshire. He produced monochrome images of working-class holiday goers dipping their toes in the pool and playing family games, inspired by Tony Ray-Jones’s photographs from the 1960s and how he depicted a declining England. The work predates the vibrant imagery that he became known for, where exposure to John Hinde’s brightly coloured postcards left a lasting imprint on his later use of colour.
His final diploma project was ‘Home Sweet Home’, an installation recreating the British living room. Even then, he was less interested in portraiture than in decor, exploring how taste and furniture can be viewed as signals of belonging.
Parr’s first major project to bring him international attention was The Last Resort, made between 1983 and 1985 and now the subject of a retrospective of the same name at the Martin Parr Foundation, located in Bristol’s Paintworks creative complex. Having moved with his wife Susie Parr to Wallasey, Merseyside in 1982, Parr spent three summers cycling to the nearby seaside resort of New Brighton, photographing day-trippers, bathers and fairground scenes with a saturated colour palette and daylight flash that defined the prevailing norms of black-and-white documentary at the time. Influenced by American colour pioneers like Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggleston, and inspired by the postcard gaudiness of Hinde’s work, Parr used his medium-format camera and flash to produce images depicting bright swimsuits alongside fast-food packaging, screaming children roaming concrete promenades, clusters of sunburned beachgoers contrasting with buzzing amusement arcades and dented plastic chairs perched atop littered sand. The details are deliberate, forming a designed environment in which class experience unfolds in the frame.
The critical response to this work, exhibited in Liverpool in 1985 and a year later at the Serpentine Gallery in London, was hostile. It was described as patronising or voyeuristic. Parr was accused of exploiting working-class subjects from his middle-class vantage point. He shrugged off the hostility, arguing that he was simply photographing what was there. He was not being judgmental but documenting the lived reality of his subjects. “When the show opened at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool in the winter of 1985, guests dressed appropriately, with rain hats, swimming costumes, lilos and Pac a Macs. No one batted an eyelid at the images: that was what New Brighton was like. It is a well-documented fact that the response to the show at The Serpentine was rather different,” recalls Susie Parr.
When I asked him about this, he laughed off the controversy: “Ah, look at this journalistic nose! Yes, there was [controversy]. The series was shown in Liverpool first, and no-one batted an eyelid because everyone knows what it’s like. And when it came to the Serpentine, that’s when some people objected – political people, like yourself, you see. Have you been much in the North?” he poked, smiling as I replied with a no. “Well, there you go. You see, you’re the person who might have been shocked by this out of ignorance, because you won’t have been to a depressed town like Sunderland.”
If some questioned the nature of his work, others admired what Parr was doing, and in 1994 he was invited to join Magnum Photos, the cooperative agency established amongst others by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, a move that proved unexpectedly contentious. Some members questioned whether his saturated palette and irony aligned with Magnum’s humanist tradition. He was nonetheless elected and later served as Magnum’s president between 2013 and 2017 – a convincing demonstration of the extent to which his vision reshaped the practice of contemporary documentary photography. His retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002 later confirmed that he had entered the canon.
After The Last Resort, Parr released his next major project titled The Cost of Living (1987-89), photographing shopping trips, dinner parties and open days at exclusive schools around Bristol and Bath. The resulting book, published by Cornerhouse in 1989 – one of more than 100 other publications from Parr – highlighted the aspirational aspects of British life after a decade of Thatcherism, showing what he described as “the comfortable classes”. The patterned carpets, floral wallpapers, net curtains and matching soft furnishings are aesthetic codes of aspiration – signals of when home ownership and tasteful interiors were bound up with ideas of respectability and success.
At the same time Parr began travelling internationally, documenting mass tourism – a “subject full of propaganda”, he told me – in what became Small World (1987-94), first published by Dewi Lewis in 1995. The work is a biting study of global mass tourism, capturing tourists in honeypot locations, swept up in a parade of white shirts and cameras raised to the sky as they overcrowd plazas and monuments – places like Venice, Machu Picchu, Pisa and Barcelona before the tourism strikes and visitor caps. We see souvenir stalls, folding cafe chairs, queue barriers, laminated menus and signage systems created to manage mass movement. These are the holiday makers, the quick-stop image-snappers whose leisure is shaped by package deals, budget airlines and ticking off the must-see sights. Tourism, in Parr’s framing, is an engineered set-up of desire and consumption that ends up producing sameness across continents.
In Common Sense (1995-99), he produced more than 350 brightly coloured, macro-lens photographs examining global consumerism. There’s greasy food and tourist tat that will be thrown away, shot at close range with an almost aggressive flash, then flattened into glossy, colourful surfaces that mimic the style of advertising. Both projects map a later phase of capitalism in which identity became assembled through disposable goods and excess.
Reflecting on why he turned to tourism, Parr told me: “All of the travel pages in the newspapers make it look very attractive, but they would never want to show the issues or the problems with over-popularity in places like Barcelona and Venice. It just seemed like a natural thing to do.”
Parr repeatedly said that he was interested in photographing what people didn’t think was important, like the unglamorous side of travelling, or the ordinary meals you eat and the objects from souvenir shops you end up taking home. At the time these images were made, they often felt aggressively present, even irritatingly or grotesquely so. Critics initially read The Last Resort or Common Sense as confrontational because the scenes were too familiar, too close to lived reality to be comfortable. But what Parr understood, perhaps more clearly with time, is that everything becomes historical.
In 2014, he formalised that understanding of legacy by founding the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, dedicated to preserving and championing British and Irish documentary photography. Alongside housing his own archive, the foundation has supported and platformed emerging voices such as Rene Matić and Ian Weldon, while safeguarding the work of figures including Chris Killip. It was a way of archiving and shaping how documentary history might be perceived in the future.
That question of reading and re-reading comes sharply into focus in Global Warning, the retrospective at Jeu de Paume assembled with curator Quentin Bajac. Showing work produced since the 70s, the exhibition proposes that meaning is not fixed at the moment an image is made but accumulates through time. Photographs once seen as humorous studies of leisure and excess are now registering differently as evidence of a collapsing climate and of a system built on consumption. In the accompanying publication, Bajac cites Parr’s 2009 visit to Quang Tri province in Vietnam, where flooding devastated rice harvests for the local farmers. Parr later wrote: “I can now see how nearly all the images that I have recently taken and produced are indirectly related to climate change.”
Environmental collapse is rarely the result of a single catastrophe. It emerges from the millions of small, designed decisions made in the name of convenience. Parr captured those decisions in chip wrappers, patio furniture, plastic packaging and low-cost flights. To look at his archive now is to recognise that the environments we once treated as neutral backdrops were always sites of consequence. Parr did not set out to be an environmental photographer, and yet by treating the ordinary as infrastructure, he produced a record of how thoroughly leisure, aspiration and consumption were engineered into everyday life – and how fragile those systems have become.
The Last Resort by Martin Parr is on display at Martin Parr Foundation until 24 May 2026
Martin Parr Global Warning is on display at Jeu de Paume, Paris until 24 May 2026
This article is taken from Anima Issue 4, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here