And now work by all three is being brought together in an exhibition in New Brighton, in a sailing school that looks over many of the sights recorded in their images.

Though controversial at the time, the photo series had something of a revolutionary effect in England, established a place for documentary photography in contemporary art and made Parr famous worldwide. Instead of golden sands, which disappeared in the 1960s due to the tidal changes of the River Mersey, concrete abounds, making ordinary beach scenes somewhat dystopian. He has experimented using medium format with flash, then a standard lens, and most recently the telephoto lens. More broadly though, he never would again so unselfconsciously risk exposing himself to the accusation of exploiting his subjects in the way he was thought to be doing here.The series was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London and published as a book in 1986, and was instrumental in establishing Parr’s reputation as a photographer.

Thatcher’s effect on the social, as opposed to the merely economic aspects of English life, see Tony Judt, Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945, Vintage, 2010, pgs.This picture is dominated by a rubbish bin attached to a pillar, which is placed in the centre of the composition. And because I was always doing pictures, going to the same places year after year, I became part of the scenery. Similarly, to describe the work now, with the benefit of hindsight, as ‘warm’ or ‘affectionate’ in its portrayal of a given class is perhaps true, but it also ascribes an almost moral purpose to something that is more usefully understood in sociological – and indeed, photographic – terms.

He studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic along with Peter Fraser, Brian Griffin, Daniel Meadows and Charlie Meecham. It is not for nothing that Philip Jones Griffiths could denounce Parr as a ‘Thatcherite photographer’ at the time of his admission to the Magnum agency. By the late 1970s the days of the British Seaside holiday had all but ended – the annual week’s holiday had shifted increasingly towards daytrips. It seems to me, however, that style is only part of the answer, though there is no doubt that Parr fusing the aesthetics of American colour photography to ‘documentary’ subjects was, in its own way, radical.In honour of such a brilliant collaboration, we spoke to Parr to discover the story behind this legendary series. It is a deliberate clash of the old world and the new, their values opposed, and we are left in no doubt that one will cancel out the other – demolish it, in fact, with ‘ordinary’ people stranded uncertainly in the path of this inevitable collision. Picasso’s sizable oeuvre grew to include over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures,ceramics, theater sets, and costume designs.