Peter Bialobrzeski made the photographs in Give My Regards to Elizabeth while living in England in the early 1990s. Having completed his studies at the Folkwang School in Essen, the German photographer received a one-year DAAD stipend to attend the London College of Communication. The resulting work records a country seen at close range by a young visitor alert to unfamiliar social codes and divisions.

The period was marked by a pointed contrast. Reunified Germany was experiencing economic expansion and a climate of optimism, while Britain remained in recession, with unemployment rising and confidence receding. Bialobrzeski encountered the enduring effects of Thatcherite capitalism in both people and places, as well as a class structure more conspicuous than the one he had known in Germany. His photographs therefore operate on two levels: as observations of everyday Britain and as a historical document of a society negotiating the aftermath of the 1980s.

British colour photography of that decade provided an important visual reference. Yet the book’s distinctiveness also lies in the survival of its original form. Bialobrzeski initially assembled the pictures into two hand-bound dummies; when Dewi Lewis Publishing issued the work in 2020, twenty-seven years later, it retained the early layout in a near-facsimile presentation. This continuity preserves not only the individual images but also the photographer’s first decisions about sequence, rhythm, and juxtaposition. An essay by Mick Brown accompanies the photographs.

For collectors, the book’s significance rests less on retrospective embellishment than on this direct connection between an early body of work and its original conception. Across 96 pages, it brings together a specific social moment, an outsider’s view of Britain, and visual ideas that would continue to develop throughout Bialobrzeski’s subsequent practice. It deserves attention as both a record of early-1990s Britain and a document of a photographer forming his language through the photobook.