Martin Parr Saw Who We Really Are

Note: This is the third of three essays by Samuel J. Abrams focusing the lives of important contributors to American civic aesthetics -- creators who have shown us how the arts and the built environment can enrich the formation and practice of civic life. (Here is the first essay and here is the second.) This is an important topic, and one to which we’ll return.

The news of Martin Parr’s passing feels like a quiet rupture in the cultural record. Parr was not simply a photographer. He was a documentarian of civic life in its most unguarded, democratic, and unselfconscious forms. His lens captured modernity not through abstractions or theories, but through the granular details of how people move through everyday spaces; details most of us overlook, though they reveal who we are more honestly than any political slogan or census table.

Parr’s world was not the realm of monumental architecture or carefully manicured urbanism. His was the realm of beaches, food courts, supermarkets, small high streets, half-faded seaside towns, and the awkward social choreography of leisure. These places – often dismissed as banal or vulgar by cultural elites – were, for Parr, civic landscapes. They were the stages on which people negotiated class, aspiration, identity, and belonging. And he treated them with a seriousness that contemporary social analysis often reserves only for institutions. That alone made his work radical.

His breakthrough series, The Last Resort (1983–85), remains one of the clearest articulations of his worldview. Shot in New Brighton, it documented working-class families vacationing in a declining seaside town during an era of economic upheaval. What gives the series its power is not its critique but its honesty. The trash-strewn beaches, sunburned children clutching melting ice creams, and parents asleep in plastic chairs are not staged, not idealized, and not mocked. They are simply visible – as they were, as they lived, as they coped. In an era obsessed with “representation,” Parr represented ordinary people by refusing to turn them into symbols. He allowed them to occupy the center of the frame.

His camera understood, long before social media made it inescapable, that consumer life is a language. His 1990s project Signs of the Times, which explored domestic décor trends and the earnest, sometimes touching, sometimes absurd ways people construct self-identity inside their homes, reads today like an early ethnography of aspirational culture. The floral sofas, plastic-laminated dining tables, and proudly displayed tchotchkes signal the same anxieties and yearnings that now play out algorithmically on Instagram and Pinterest. Parr understood that taste is never neutral; it is a form of self-expression shaped by class, exposure, and the emotional economies of late capitalism.

Even before that, his early black-and-white documentary work from the 1970s – nonconformist chapel communities, declining rural villages, small-town rituals – captured a Britain on the cusp of social transformation. The scenes feel intimate and already fading: congregations thinning, traditions eroding, a sense of place stretching thinner each year. That early attentiveness to social texture deepened into the saturated flash aesthetic that made Parr famous. But the core remained: a desire to record how people inhabit spaces, how spaces shape them in return, and how modernity rearranges both.

What distinguishes Parr’s work, especially to anyone who studies civic life, is that it refuses both nostalgia and contempt. Many cultural observers treat consumer spaces and mass leisure with either hand-wringing or disdain. Parr took a different path. He documented these spaces with anthropological fidelity, without sentimentality, without moralizing, and without surrendering to cynicism. His images of crowded beaches with their sprawling towels, patterned swimsuits, folding chairs, squinting faces do not mock their subjects. They reveal public life in one of its few remaining egalitarian environments. A beach is one of the last places where class, age, and background spill into each other, however imperfectly. Parr noticed these collisions and treated them as central rather than marginal to modern civic experience.

Color was essential to his argument. At a time when “serious” photography still clung to black-and-white aesthetics, Parr insisted that modern life was too bright, too saturated, too garish to be rendered in monochrome. His palette captured not just the surface of consumer culture but its psychological atmosphere. The neon signs, fluorescent supermarket aisles, cheap souvenirs, vivid plastic toys; these were the textures of everyday aspiration. He did not hide or soften them. He made viewers confront the world as it actually was, not as they preferred it to be.

This is why Parr’s work matters so deeply now. The world he photographed is evaporating. High streets struggle, independent shops shutter, seaside towns are hollowed out, and informal public life is increasingly displaced by screens. The rituals he captured – families picnicking on unfashionable promenades, couples wandering through shabby arcades, children making their own unstructured fun – are giving way to curated leisure, algorithmically filtered entertainment, and a civic sphere where spontaneity feels like a relic.

Parr’s photographs are not simply nostalgic artifacts; they are records of a social ecosystem that once sustained a sense of common life. In his images, you see the friction and humor of people encountering difference casually, without mediation. You see informal norms negotiated without institutional intervention. You see the everyday indignities and everyday pleasures that formed the connective tissue of community life – messy, fragmented, ordinary, but shared.

Critically, Parr’s photography also documents the geography of inequality without preaching. In The Last Resort, the decaying seaside amusements reflect economic strain without turning the families enjoying them into props. In Signs of the Times, interior décor reveals aspiration and insecurity without indicting the people who embraced it. Across his global projects – from tourism culture in Europe and Asia to food rituals in the United States – he mapped how consumer culture shapes social expectations while leaving room for agency, humor, and tenderness.

For those of us who write about civic culture, community, and the changing built environment, Parr’s archive is invaluable. It is visual sociology of the highest order; not for its technical mastery but for its insight into how people live. His images show that civic life does not reside solely in institutions or grand projects. It resides in the mundane negotiations of public space, in the quiet dramas of leisure, in the informal social codes that govern queues, beaches, parks, and discount stores. These are the places where people encounter one another as citizens, not abstractions.

Parr’s death comes at a moment when the very idea of unmediated public togetherness feels fragile. His work reminds us of what we risk losing: uncurated spaces, unselfconscious rituals, the kind of public intimacy that emerges when we are not performing for a digital audience. He captured the ordinary before it became endangered.

In the end, Martin Parr’s legacy is not only artistic. It is civic. He showed us that everyday life – messy, colorful, contradictory – is worth understanding. He restored visibility to people often ignored in cultural narratives. He taught us that the vernacular spaces of modern life are not trivial but foundational. And he insisted that to see society clearly, we must look directly at how ordinary people actually live, not how we imagine they do. That clarity is a gift, and we are fortunate he left so much of it behind.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics and social science at Sarah Lawrence College and a member of the Civic Life advisory council.

This essay was originally published in newgeography on December 9, 2025.