Portrait of Britain Vol 2 began as an exhibition without walls. Each year the British Journal of Photography opens a call for portraits made across the United Kingdom and puts the chosen pictures on digital billboard screens — railway stations, airports, shopping centres, high streets — where they reach an audience far larger than any gallery could hold. The book, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2019, is the print record of that year’s showing: one hundred images selected by a panel of judges, joined by a further hundred from the shortlist.
That mechanism explains what kind of book this is. There is no single photographer here. The two hundred plates represent as many individual authors, and the volume keeps their voices separate rather than folding them into one editorial line, printing photographers’ own remarks and information about each picture alongside the images. Ekow Eshun contributes the introduction.
The subject is Britain itself, approached one face at a time. Chosen through an open call and a jury rather than commissioned, these portraits register the diversity, culture and identity of a country at a contested moment in its recent politics. Taken together they amount to an argument about who the nation is made of — an answer assembled from hundreds of independent decisions rather than one sensibility.
The object carries that weight. Three hundred and thirty-two hardback pages, in a format small enough to hold through a single sitting and dense enough that accumulation does the work: familiarity, difference, repetition, surprise. Sequence matters, and so does the apparatus of quotations and captions that turns a competition shortlist into something closer to a usable document.
For a collector, the interest lies in the form rather than in any one name: a jury-selected annual survey of contemporary British portraiture, made in collaboration between a photography journal and a small independent press, and belonging in a collection as the volume that documents a particular year of an ongoing project.
