Legendary photographer Martin Parr looks back on his work and recalls the way we were

This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine in August 2025 – just months ahead of Parr’s death on Saturday 6th December 2025.

“Yellow card!” Martin Parr admonishes. “You’re intellectualising these things a bit too much for my liking.”

I have earned his reproach for suggesting that the razing of the Lido in New Brighton — as featured in The Last Resort, the series of photographs that made his name — could be seen as a metaphor for the hollowing-out of Britain’s working-class communities over the past 40 years. “There’s politics in my images if you want to find it, but I don’t push it down people’s throats,” Parr proclaims. “People should just sit back and enjoy the images, really.”

People certainly do enjoy Parr’s photography. As well as chronicling changing life in Britain, Parr’s work has transformed photography itself, with his garish but gritty signature style influencing everything from fashion editorials to war-zone reportage.

Why does he take photographs? “It’s just what I do naturally,” he says. “I have a desire to go out and capture these images, and the crazier the scene in front of me, the happier I am.”

The subject of a BBC4 documentary and co-author of an upcoming memoir, Utterly Lazy and Inattentive, which looks at his life by reflecting on 150 of his best-known photographs, Parr says that of the hundreds of thousands of photographs he’s taken, not one of them has been perfect — though he’s got close.

“You know when you’re out shooting that most pictures you take aren’t going to be perfect or great. But you keep shooting to have that momentum so, as and when, things start to fall into place.” Parr ponders. “It’s just the luck of finding a scene.”

Mayor of Todmorden’s Inaugural Banquet, West Yorkshire 1977

“Between 1975 and 1980, I lived in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire and would attend all the different social events that were going on. This photograph was taken at the inauguration of the mayor of Todmorden, and it’s the best buffet scene I’ve ever managed to shoot. I’ve done buffet scenes many times since, but I’ve never managed to equal it. It’s the guy in the middle squeezing his way through that makes the picture.”

Sedlescombe 1995—99

“I started using a macro camera, which I bought in 1995, and that was a real revelation: using the camera to focus on the foreground and letting the background fall out of focus. I started out doing pictures of things like British food, then different days around Europe, and then ended up doing these series of pictures in England. You can see here the flash on the Union Jack and you can see the outline of the woman sitting behind. Those two things combined made the picture really work.”

New Brighton 1983—85

“We moved to Wallasey in 1982, and just down the road was New Brighton, a resort that I knew would be very interesting to photograph. And so it was. I got there when it was looking very shabby, lots of litter on the ground, which I liked, and I worked on this project over the next three years. It turned out to be the most successful one I’ve ever done. The flash and the palette of quite bright colours done with a colour negative for quite intense rendition was novel, very different to other colour documentary images.”

Skegness 1992

“Whenever there was a dramatic news headline, I used to go out and try to capture people reading newspapers. It’s not something you’d do now, because newspapers have virtually disappeared, especially the red tops. If you went to the seaside today, you probably wouldn’t see anyone reading a paper — maybe a few older people — but everyone else would be looking at their phones. Smartphones affected everything. Cameras are being replaced by smartphones and everyone’s a photographer now. I take proper pictures on my phone because the quality is so good, especially when there’s no light.”

New Brighton 1983—85

“This is the burger bar at the New Brighton Lido. Obviously everyone at the front is concentrating on either getting their burger or putting the tomato sauce on it, but as for the others… I’ve been back to New Brighton a few times, but the energy that was there in the 1980s has disappeared because the Lido, which was one of the best and biggest buildings there, has been pulled down. It’s gone — levelled [after a storm in 1990] and nothing was built on the site for years.”

Sand Bay 1997

“You couldn’t get a better cup of tea if you went to a studio and set it all up. I got this at one of our favourite cafés in Weston-super-Mare, Monks's Rest, where they also did great scones. It’s closed down now. The teacup and the saucer are perfect, the colour of the tea is pretty good, and the tablecloth with the gingham is also good: this cup of tea is the classic cliché. Therefore it gets used quite a lot, on things like T-shirts, and imitated. I encourage pastiche of my work. I take milk in my tea. Just milk.”

If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide.

Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10, PLUS a £10 John Lewis and Partners voucher delivered to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.