Life's a Beach

Martin Parr has been photographing beaches for decades, and Life's a Beach gathers work from across that ongoing project into a single compact volume. The pictures span locations from Brighton to Miami to Japan to West Africa, all shot in Parr's signature style: saturated color, direct flash in flat daylight, close proximity to his subjects, and a sustained interest in the absurd and the tender coexisting in the same frame. The beach for Parr is one of the few remaining spaces where people from different classes and cultures act out similar rituals in public, making it a reliable subject for the kind of social observation that runs through his entire career.

The book is a smaller format gift edition rather than a comprehensive retrospective, covering roughly forty years of beach photographs selected and sequenced for a general audience. Essay by Val Williams.