The Royal Windsor Horse Show unfolds each year inside the grounds of Windsor Castle, and Anderson & Low photographed it as an inhabited landscape rather than a ceremonial spectacle. Their book, published by Dewi Lewis in 2015, follows the week’s four equestrian disciplines, the military displays of the King’s Troop, the Household Cavalry and other regiments, and the visiting troupes, but its attention settles on the people who hold the event together: competitors, breeders, grooms, support staff and spectators. The photographs describe a working world in which formality and informality keep crossing, and Elizabeth II moves between the Royal Box and unscripted walks through the grounds.

Anderson & Low have collaborated for more than twenty-five years on photographic and video projects, often organised around sport, and their work has been shown at the Venice Biennale and is held in numerous public, museum and national collections. That background matters here. The portraits depend on the trust the photographers establish with their sitters, which allows the candid character studies at the centre of the book. What results is closer to a social portrait of an institution at leisure than to reportage of a single event.

The book’s scale supports this approach. Ninety-six colour plates are distributed across 112 pages in a hardback with dust jacket, dimensions of roughly 24.5 by 31.8 centimetres giving the pictures room to hold both individual faces and the wider choreography of the castle grounds. The setting is not simply a backdrop; it is part of the subject, and the sequence moves between the two registers.

For a collector, the interest lies in that double focus. Anderson & Low are not documenting the pageant for its own sake but examining how an annual ritual produces intimacy, hierarchy, costume and display. The book gives a sustained account of a photographer duo working at the top of their form, and of a national occasion seen from the inside.