Portrait of Britain Vol 3 collects two hundred photographs from the British Journal of Photography’s annual open-call portrait award, published by Hoxton Mini Press as the exhibition’s accompanying volume. The selected portraits also appear on digital billboard screens across the United Kingdom, where the publisher notes they are seen by an audience of more than ten million.

The book’s subtitle, 200 Photographs That Capture the Face of a Changing Nation, states its scope plainly. Many of the pictures were made during the pandemic, and the themes they record belong to that period: frontline workers, Black Lives Matter protests, socially distanced celebrations, home schooling, improvised haircuts, the ordinary textures of staying at home. Each portrait is accompanied by a story, so the volume reads less as a gallery of faces than as a set of overlapping testimonies.

The selection comes from an open call judged by a panel of experts rather than from a single photographer’s project. Brunel Johnson is credited for the cover image, and David Olusoga writes the introduction; the photographers whose work appears inside are numerous. That collective structure is the point. The book is an anthology, and its authority rests on breadth rather than on one signature.

For a collector, the appeal lies in what the volume documents: a single year in Britain at a moment of political and social change, assembled in the form the publisher’s own listing describes — a hardback with cloth spine and uncoated paper. It is the third in a series, and its usefulness is likely to sharpen as the distance between the photographs and the reader grows. This is not a monograph prized for scarcity. It is a record, and records of unsettled years tend to be consulted long after the news has moved on.