In 1986, the photographer Martin Parr published a book that would define him in the public mind for the rest of his career. Parr, who has died aged 73, was then living in Wallasey, Merseyside. His photographs, of the nearby resort of New Brighton, showed northerners at play: men in cloth caps eating chips with their fingers; women sitting on buckets; children eyeing virulent ice creams; rubbish blowing under leaden skies. The book in which these appeared was called The Last Resort. It would propel Parr to fame, if not, at first, to popularity.
Shown in an exhibition in Liverpool, the images in The Last Resort initially met with a positive reception. When the show transferred to the Serpentine Gallery in London, however, there was outcry. “Our historic working class becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience,” fumed one London critic. “They appear fat, simple, styleless, tediously conformist, wear cheap flashy clothes and in true conservative fashion are resigned to their meagre lot.” There was much more in this vein.
The trouble was that Parr, who had moved to Wallasey due to his wife Susie Mitchell’s work as a speech therapist, was middle class and southern. The son of Donald Parr, a civil servant, and Joyce (nee Watts), he was born in Epsom, Surrey, and educated at Surbiton grammar school.
When, in 1996, Parr’s younger contemporary Richard Billingham showed photographs of a tattooed woman and her drunken husband in their Black Country council flat, he received a critical thumbs-up because the pair were his mother and father. Parr’s parents were Methodists who had taken their son birdwatching. At the height of the Thatcherite assault on the northern working class, the pictures in The Last Resort were seen as satirical at best, at worst as sneering.
This was unfair. Parr’s interest in photography had been sparked by his grandfather George Parr, a retired printer, amateur photographer and Yorkshireman who lived outside Leeds. Holidays spent with George and his wife, Florrie, left the young Martin with a love not just of photography but of the north. “The advantage of coming from Surrey is that everywhere else looks more interesting,” he would say. “There was a sense of community [in the north] that didn’t exist in the south.”
He would remain, by his own estimation, politically of the soft left. In Parr’s eyes, the photographs in The Last Resort were not patronising but “lyrical”, a poetic version of the social research project Mass Observation. This was not how they were seen, however, by many of his profession.
When, eight years after The Last Resort, Parr applied to join the renowned Magnum photo agency in 1994, he was met with fierce resistance from members. Henri Cartier-Bresson sent him a telegram suggesting that he was from another planet; the war photographer Philip Jones Griffiths accused Parr of fascism. His membership was finally approved by a margin of one vote, the narrowest in the agency’s history. None of this bothered Parr in the least. “I just got on with it,” he said. “I had total self-belief.”
As he saw it, his photographs of the holidaymakers of New Brighton took them on their own terms. The Last Resort was the first time he had used colour in his work, the book’s rich saturations inspired by those of the American master William Eggleston. “I’m attracted like a jackdaw to colour and sweets,” Parr said, two traits he shared with his subjects.
He also understood their drive to consume, an over-abundance of images being as much a symptom of modern life as the surfeit of leisure and junk food.
Yet his photographs were the opposite of junk. If his eye seemed drawn to trash, it was with the aim of elevating it to art. Parr’s first show after leaving Manchester Polytechnic (Manchester Metropolitan University), where he studied photography from 1970 to 1972, was called Home Sweet Home. This was an installation avant la lettre: images were shown in a jerry-rigged house modelled on an actual one in Bradford. Its walls were hung with rose paper and flying ducks, The Sound of Music played on a cassette. Long before Billingham or Wolfgang Tillmans, Parr was taking lens-based work out of specialist photo galleries and into the wider world of art.
His upbringing stayed with him. Tall and laconic, Parr dressed like an insurance salesman or junior accountant. If he had rebelled at Methodist Sunday school, he retained a Noncomformist’s belief in the value of hard work. A word much in his lexicon was “lazy”. “All you see is lazy photography everywhere,” Parr might say, or, “Other photographers are lazy. They’re not as obsessed as I am.”
Obsession, too, followed him from childhood, his birdwatcher parents having encouraged him to see the world taxonomically. (The young Parr, branching out, had also been a keen trainspotter.) He recorded his human subjects as he might have a genus of finches, via plumage, habitat and diet.
This was not confined to the working class. In 1989, after he and Susie had moved to Bristol, Parr published The Cost of Living, a meditation on Britain after a decade of Thatcherism. The photographs of stiff women in Liberty print frocks and public schoolboys in unconvincing top hats were every bit as unblinking as the ones in The Last Resort had been; maybe more so, being shot through with a social insecurity that was missing in New Brighton.
A two-year stint as the City of London’s photographer-in-residence from 2013 led to Unseen City, pictures of men in red frock coats, lace jabots and nosegays. As always with Parr, satire, if it was there, was in the eye of the beholder.
All this was underpinned by the obsessiveness that verged on the clinical. People were only one of the things that Parr taxonomised. Photographing objects, he said, saved him from having to hoard them.
Even so, the elegant Clifton townhouse where he and Susie lived was full of stuff – wristwatches with pictures of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi on them; models of the Russian cartoon characters Space Dogs; Spice Girls crisp bags. Particularly treasured were the boxes of images of British civic centres and car parks that led, in 1999, to a book called Boring Postcards, followed, in 2004, by its American equivalent.
Parr’s delighted discovery, in 2000, of a town in Oregon called Boring resulted in yet another book, this time with shots of the Boring Middle School and Boring Sewage Treatment Facility.
By 50, Parr was spending more than half his time abroad, photographing everywhere from Qatar to Cambodia. Scandinavian countries were a particular favourite, because, Parr said, they were “neat”. Travel also coincided with a new interest in collecting images of himself.
For two decades from 1996, Parr asked strangers to photograph him wherever in the world he happened to be working. The resultant shots were as impassively cheesy as the ones in Last Resort had been: Parr dressed as a sheikh in Abu Dhabi; against a fake woodland backdrop in a studio in Madeira; with a monkey in polka-dot shorts in Benidorm.
This broadening of his focus beyond a single class or country led, by the turn of the century, to his rehabilitation among fellow photographers. In 2013, he was elected president of the same Magnum photo agency that had nearly turned down his membership 20 years before.
By then, Parr had been the subject of a retrospective at the Barbican in London (2002) and, the following year, of an Alan Yentob documentary on the BBC. A show called Only Human at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019 acted as a 40-year summing-up of his portraiture.
The Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol, which he set up in 2017, supports emerging or overlooked British artists through bursaries and buying their work, as well as holding his own vast archive.
In 2021 he was appointed CBE. The same year, he was diagnosed with myeloma, a type of bone-marrow cancer. A documentary, I Am Martin Parr, came out earlier this year, and his photographic autobiography, Utterly Lazy and Inattentive, the title coming from a school report on the 14-year-old Parr, was published in September.
Parr is survived by Susie, whom he married in 1980, their daughter, Ellen, and grandson, George, and by his sister, Vivien.
• Martin Parr, photographer, born 23 May 1952; died 6 December 2025
