“If I’m knocking on the Pearly Gates and they say, ‘Okay, mate, what have you done? Just show us one book. See if you can get in,’ I’ll still go for The Last Resort.”

Parr accepted that The Last Resort would forever be his calling card. And, after his passing, the talking points returned to his position as an interloper from the Home Counties poking his lens around the detritus of a working-class seaside town in Merseyside. Few ever mention that he was living in Wallasey at the time, of which New Brighton is a suburb.

“If you think about the early days of Martin’s work, he was photographing the areas where he was living and working,” says Dewi Lewis, who has known Parr since the mind-1980s and published many of his books, including the first reprint of The Last Resort, which had initially been self-published in 1986. “When he was in Hebden Bridge, he was doing local stuff,” most memorably with the series, The Non-Conformists shot in Calderdale’s Methodist chapels, published by Aperture in 2013, some 33 years after it was completed. “And New Brighton was local.”

Time has smoothed the edges off The Last Resort’s very palpable rupture from the dominant humanist documentary tradition. Yet it’s easy to see how the photographs appeared different; not just because they were shot in colour with the clarity of medium format, both of which were more closely associated with commercial imagery, but because they were unromantic. “Our historic working class, normally dealt with generously by documentary photographers, becomes a sitting duck for a more sophisticated audience,” wrote David Lee in Arts Review when it was exhibited at Serpentine Gallery in London. “They appear fat, simple, styleless, tediously conformist and unable to assert any individual identity.”

Parr’s defenders argue that the ugliness in the pictures lay in the eyes of the beholders. “I was brought up in Rhyll in North Wales, which is very similar to New Brighton,” says Lewis. “I worked in the amusement arcades. I did all the summer jobs that you do in that sort of place. So I knew all those people. And I knew that there was no sense of it being exploitative.”

Neil Burgess showed the work at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, before the Serpentine exhibition, alongside Tom Wood’s photographs of New Brighton. “It was seen by some as taking the piss out of the working classes, which to a certain extent it was. But I don’t think the working classes gave a fuck, really. They came into the show and thought it was hysterical. We didn’t have any complaints from people who saw themselves in those pictures at all.”

Parr remained grateful that the work was still being talked about decades later. The show at the Serpentine and then at Rencontres d’Arles festival in 1986 put him on a new trajectory towards the figure we know today. He is one of the few photographers to transcend his medium and become not just an internationally celebrated artist, but an instantly recognisable figure in wider popular culture. However, The Last Resort tends to overshadow the work he made over the next 15 years, when he was at his prolific peak, putting out an extraordinary series of books, including The Cost of Living, One Day Trip, Signs of the Times, Bored Couples, Small World and his magnum opus, Common Sense. 

Published by Dewi Lewis in 1999, Common Sense was — and still is — a wildly original and audacious take on consumer culture, focused in extreme close up. It’s the book he said he’d be holding in reply at the Pearly Gates, in case they asked for another chance to get in. “It’s when I put together the experimentation I’d done with the macro lens,” he recalled in the Zoom talk in 2020. “One of the dangers of being me is that I get lazy and complacent and repeat myself ad infinitum, which I could do pretty easily. So the thing is to give yourself challenges. I’ve always used the beach as my experimental lab. I first started the medium format pictures in New Brighton. I then applied the macro lens to the beach. Then I thought I’d challenge myself and use a telephoto lens [for Beach Therapy, published in 2018] because in the world of art and documentary photography, it’s generally frowned upon.”

Lewis says that even Parr was unsure about Common Sense, and that it might have all been different. “He said that he had a new project that he wanted to show me, but he wasn’t quite there with it. He was still weighing up in his own mind whether it was something that he wanted to keep going on…. Before things really started taking off for him, around 1997 to 98, he was getting properly interested in book collecting. He turned to me at one point and said, ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with photography, but I really love books. I should go and open a bookshop.’ How serious he was, I’ve no idea. And within two or three months, he started making films. That must have also been about the same time that he was developing Common Sense. So, in a sense, it all ties in that he hadn’t quite worked out where he would go next with work.”

He persevered, and this time the world was ready to embrace the shock of the new. Alongside the book, Common Sense opened as a simultaneous exhibition in 41 venues around the world, from Janet Borden in New York, the first commercial gallery to fully represent him, to the Australian Centre for Photography and the House of Filmmakers in Moscow. Parr would be the first to admit that his very best work was now behind him, but he remained prolific, especially after becoming a full member of Magnum Photos in the mid-1990s, embracing a new role as an in-demand fashion and commercial photographer. Meanwhile, his public profile grew far and wide, much of it on the back of his 2002 retrospective initiated by Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum, curated by Val Williams, which toured Europe for the next five years.

In this next overlapping phase of his career, Parr turned more of his attention towards curating and collecting. He was Guest Artistic Director for Rencontres d’Arles in 2004, and arguably that edition of the festival has never been bettered. The same year saw the publication of the first volume of The Photobook: A History, a serious and scholarly research project completed with Gerry Badger, challenging the dominant narrative of the medium. Parrworld opened at Haus de Kunst in Munich in 2008 featuring his collection of objects, postcards, prints by other photographers, and his vast archive of photobooks, later acquired by Tate and the Luma foundation. 

For many in the photography community, this is his most important legacy. “Martin is the reason for the photobook revolution,” says Lewis. “Someone may have come later, but it’s really all down to Martin and his enthusiasm for the book form. And, if you think about it, who else could it be? He got it going.”

The sale of his photobook collection, for a middling seven-figure sum, helped pay for the focus of the third and last phase of his career, opening a foundation in Bristol supporting emerging, established and overlooked photographers who have made and continue to make work focused on Britain and Ireland. The Foundation’s collection holds more than 5000 prints, from postwar figures such as Marketa Luskacova, Charlie Philips, Tony Ray-Jones, Joy Gregory and Chris Killip, to emerging artists from the last 10-15 years, such as Clementine Schneidermann and Rene Matic. International photographers are represented with major works shot in the UK and Ireland, such as Eugene Smith’s Three Generations of Welsh Miners, alongside book maquettes which includes dummies made in the production of photobooks such as Chris Killip’s In Flagrante and Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh.

“In a strange way, Martin’s work has been slightly overlooked at the Foundation because he was so eager and excited to discover and promote the work of others,” says Jenni Smith. “We hope to spend time exploring Martin’s archive and exhibit more of his work in the gallery in the future. At the moment his Common Sense work is on display in the Foundation toilets, which he always found amusing. There is so much work that remains unseen. During Covid, Martin spent time revisiting his contact sheets and selecting new images, so scanning those negatives feels like a good place to begin that exploration.”

Find out more about Martin Parr and his Foundation here martinparrfoundation.org

“We’re opening up the space to have lasting collaborations and mutual exchanges with like-minded institutions and collectives”

Now AIF is expanding, moving into a new home in the Kantari district of Beirut and appointing a new director. Rana Nasser Eddin was director of Beirut’s Sfeir-Semler Gallery from 2010 to 2018, and administrative director of Beirut Art Center from 2019 to 2022, but has also been a frequent visitor to AIF for years. “AIF accompanied me in my academic research and there were also numerous crossovers when I was working in galleries,” she smiles. “Don’t take it from me as someone who works there, I have personally benefited from its resources and its very helpful team.”

Nasser Eddin joins at an interesting juncture, with AIF moving into a space which is both larger and more public facing than its previous home; it now occupies 800 square metres, spread over two floors and a mezzanine. She apologises for noises from the building work as we speak, but the transfer is nearing completion, and she and the AIF team have spent the morning putting books in the basement library. The library will hold about 3500 publications, she says, and is a library of libraries rather than solely AIF’s collection – AIF has joined forces with the Dawawine cultural centre, for one, and looks forward to welcoming others.

“Financial times in Lebanon are very, very difficult, so Dawawine has had to close its space,” Nasser Eddin explains. “That meant they were left with this massive collection of books on arts, film, music and theatre which would have to go into storage. We have plenty of space, so we’re happy to share. We’re opening up the space to have lasting collaborations and mutual exchanges with like-minded institutions and collectives.”

“Being alone and in the dark doesn’t agree with us,” said Dawawine in a public statement last year. “In this mad city, we found an ally in the Arab Image Foundation, and instead of reinstating a bookstore, we will be experiencing the permanence of a public library. We’ll be taking our books out of their boxes soon, and look forward to meeting readers, writers, art-makers, image seekers and researchers at AIF’s new premises, where Dawawine’s books will find a home.”

Nasser Eddin says this kind of library and research space are hard to find in Lebanon – many specialist libraries and collections are private, or held by universities, and therefore not open to the public. Even at AIF, it is a shift made possible by the new building. “Before, we were in a private 2 apartment, and just didn’t have the space 3 for desks,” she says. “Now, we have tables, desks and workstations, so people can look at our collections open-door, no appointment needed. It’s difficult to find public space like that in Beirut. It’s even difficult to find an air-conditioned space with free internet. Our library is multipurpose, we’re happy if it’s just used for research with AC on a hot day.”

“It’s not about filling in gaps in a widespread survey of photography from the region, because I can tell you there will be gaps everywhere”

Open access

Dawawine will also be able to contribute to AIF’s film programme, along with other organisations, because AIF is constructing a screening room, along with laboratories in which it preserves and digitises its collections. These labs can also be seen by the public – in fact, located in the basement, they include skylights through which people can look in from the street. “AIF is pretty unique in what it does, in terms of preservation and digitisation, so it’s great to be able to garner more interest in that technical side,” says Nasser Eddin. “Opening it to the public, allowing people to actually see what goes on, helps raise awareness.”

AIF aims to digitise all its collections, though it is a huge task and one that in some ways can never be finished – it is currently redigitising some previously digitised items, for example, because the technology and AIF’s guidelines have moved on. Nasser Eddin says she is sure that the current wave of digitisation will also need to be redone in future, as new standards and procedures come in. It is a process that requires patience, and that applies to opening these assets to the public too, though it is something AIF is keen to do.

“We need to consider the politics of technology and how we disseminate information,” she explains. “There’s a lot of gatekeeping in the art world, in terms of information, so it’s how we make things accessible, and for what purpose. We’re creating a database of information, and how that database is searched, and the language used to do so, includes political decisions. That means we have to move with a lot of careful deliberation.”

AIF is also happy to slow down its acquisitions, arguing it is important to make sure that what it already has is properly researched and studied. AIF has an extensive workshop programme, and in December ran a two-parter with the artist Edmund Clark and book designer Ben Weaver considering how colonial presence is still seen, felt and documented in still and moving images. This workshop included 13 participants from Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and Armenia, working with AIF’s holdings.

Clark and Weaver’s contribution also included a public conversation, and Nasser Eddin wants to run more public events in the future; AIF’s new home includes a sizeable space to host these gatherings and display interesting research and images. It has the potential to be a gallery, in fact, but Nasser Eddin says they prefer to keep it flexible. “Running a gallery space would be a big shift in identity,” she says. “But the space has given us that opportunity to experiment, and we’re playing around with that.

“It doesn’t necessarily need to be an exhibition space, we’re looking at how we can use it in a productive, collective way,” she adds. “We’re thinking how to make it a place where people can gather, and not just feel at home but actually make their own imprint.” It is worth adding that AIF’s work includes many interesting exhibitions hosted elsewhere, whether put together by AIF or by curators using its holdings.

Housing collections

AIF’s archiving activities remain at the heart of its mission, and the new building includes a larger cool storage room and quarantine area for incoming items. AIF both has its own collection and provides a home for others’, including archives such as the Assad Jradi Collection, which belongs to the Lebanese war photographer but has been archived at AIF. It also includes the Toufik Yazbek Collection, which brings together the photographer’s advertising work and experimental photography, plus images of the Arab diaspora in Mexico. This was part of a drive to find work on the diaspora in South America, including in Argentina and Brazil.

The Cold Cuts Collection brings together 206 prints and Polaroids taken between the 1980s and early 2000s in Lebanon and Syria, meanwhile, showing the trans woman Em Abed and her friends. These images were used by Mohamad Abdouni, an artist and editor-in-chief of Cold Cuts magazine, to curate an exhibition on Lebanese trans lives at the Mina Image Centre in 2022, along with his own shots and interviews with members of the trans community. This collection is a recent addition to AIF and, says Nasser Eddin, a meaningful one. “In recent years there has been a crackdown on queer communities in Lebanon, so providing the care needed for this collection is very important to us,” she explains.

Nasser Eddin adds that AIF is always keen to preserve collections from vulnerable communities in danger of being destroyed; AIF is currently working on Kurdish archives smuggled out of Iraq, for example, and she observes that Kurdish portrait studios and archives have often been the first places to be destroyed when Iraqi Kurds have come under attack. “There’s a need to preserve these archives, especially when their existence is actively being erased,” she says.

Lebanon was swept by ‘archive fever’ in the early 1990s and 2000s, she says, after the civil war ended; she puts this down to the urge to reconcile what had happened and use visuals to help come to terms with it. AIF also has a collection of colonial work, though currently it is more open to photographic practices from the region than the many European depictions of it. AIF is a small organisation, so it has to think how best to use its resources, says Nasser Eddin. “We look at new additions to the Foundation with deliberation,” she says. “We are not aiming to create a complete survey of the Arabic world, its diaspora and its entire history.

“It’s not about filling in gaps in a widespread survey of photography from the region, because I can tell you there will be gaps everywhere. What we hope to do is provide care for photographs and photographic practices that also feed into research and artistic practices, and create spaces for collective engagement. We want to activate the collections.”