Four decades ago, a man took lots of photos of some working-class people having a day out at the seaside. The resort was New Brighton on Merseyside, and the photos showed that the sun shone, the ice creams were runny and lots of people fell asleep in their deckchairs, resulting in their faces turning fire-engine red.

What ‘The Last Resort’ – the most famous photography project by Martin Parr, who died last month at the age of 73 – also showed, and continues to show, is that there is nothing that the liberal-artistic-media-elite loathe more than seeing ordinary people having a good time and not giving a hoot what anyone else might think of them. ‘This is a clammy, claustrophobic, nightmare world,’ wrote Robert Morris in the British Journal of Photography after viewing the pictures. ‘People lie knee-deep in chip papers, swim in polluted black pools and stare at a bleak horizon of urban dereliction.’ Other reviews were, if anything, less kind to the people depicted in Parr’s photographs.

How shocked you were, or perhaps still are, by the photos in ‘The Last........

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