Butlin's By The Sea 1972

The pictures we made for ourselves in Filey, as opposed to the work we did for Butlin's Photographic Services, were curated by Andy Sproxton (1949-1977) and Val Williams and presented, along with a series by the Victorian photographer of Whitby Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, as the inaugural show at their new photography gallery, Impressions in York, the first to open outside London.

In the years that followed, whenever Parr, Williams and I discussed the show, we always remembered it as being in black & white. My monochrome picture Butlin's Boy had become a Real Britain postcard and, in memory, it seemed to embody the whole exhibition; after all back then, black & white was the colour of photography.

(Parr wouldn't launch his groundbreaking colour work The Last Resort for another fourteen years.) However, when researching my archive in 2011, Williams turned up these colour pictures of mine — badly scratched and damaged by fungus — in the bottom of a cardboard box, along with an exhibition installation picture showing them in situ. Butlin's By The Sea hadn't, after all, been all monochrome.

Those experiments with colour transparency, now digitally repaired and restored, are the series from which the colour images here have been chosen.

See The Whole Picture video (r/t 4 min., 41 sec.) from the Guardian.