Published by Allen Lane in 1978, The English is Ian Berry’s personal study of England and English life. The project was made possible by his receipt of the first Arts Council Photography Bursary, placing the book within an institutional moment when sustained work on contemporary society could be supported as an artistic undertaking. Its subject is not simply a national label, but the social life and customs of England as encountered through Berry’s camera.

Most of the photographs were made in 1975, though Berry worked on the project for two and a half years. That duration is important: the book emerged from continued attention rather than a brief assignment or a single occasion. Berry’s stated personal approach also distinguishes the work from an encyclopedic survey. England appears here as something observed over time and shaped into a considered photographic account.

The broad title and the explicitly personal method create the book’s central tension. “The English” sounds collective, even definitive; Berry’s exploration is necessarily authored and situated. The subject category of social life and customs thus becomes a photographic question: how might a society be approached through an accumulation of particular encounters? This relationship between national scale and individual viewpoint gives the project significance beyond a general period record.

This first-edition hardcover comprises 111 pages and measures 28.5 by 23.5 centimetres. For collectors, its relevance lies in the conjunction of subject, sustained working method, public arts support and publication at the close of the 1970s. In its original Allen Lane form, the book preserves Berry’s inquiry as a complete, book-length statement—one grounded in a specific historical moment while remaining alert to the difficulty of representing a country and its people.