Ad Limine: Martin Parr’s Humans on the Beach. Re-empowering the English Seaside Resorts as Pop Culture

Main Article Content

Silvia Pireddu
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3357-6391

Abstract

In the 1960s, the British working class gradually replaced the coastal landscape with the beaches of the Mediterranean. The coastal resorts of England experienced a decline and a transformation into “toxic” places, ad limine. The paper investigates British coastal culture as a source of hybrid narratives. Developing the work of Ingleby and Kerr (Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh UP, 2018), it discusses the visual coastal stories of Martin Parr to understand his view of Britishness. Parr’s photographs investigate places that witnessed the empowerment and profound transformation of the English working-class identity. He provides a non-judgmental analysis of humans performing universal and ritual actions in his coloured and saturated shots that evoke impressionist beach painting. The photographs represent the English northern beach as a bright and glossy place in contrast with the political and cultural issues faced by the British working class during the last decades of the past century.

Article Details

How to Cite
Pireddu, S. (2022). Ad Limine: Martin Parr’s Humans on the Beach. Re-empowering the English Seaside Resorts as Pop Culture. Imaginaires, (24), 110-130. https://doi.org/10.34929/imaginaires.vi24.39
Section
Part 2: Spaces in Brackets
Author Biography

Silvia Pireddu, Università di Torino

Silvia Pireddu holds a PhD in English and American Cultures from IULM University in Milan. She worked under several post-doctoral grants at the University of Pavia and is currently an Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Turin. Her research interests include the history of culture, translation and stylistics, with particular reference to the intersection of the theoretical principles and the practical frameworks of art, media and history.