Portrait of Britain Vol 5 gathers the full shortlist of two hundred photographs from the annual Portrait of Britain award, organised by 1854 Media. Published in January 2023 as the fifth volume in a series made with the British Journal of Photography, it is a Hoxton Mini Press hardback of 320 pages with a cloth spine and uncoated paper, and it opens with an introduction by Rachel Segal Hamilton that sets the portraits within their cultural context. The cover image is by Afolabi Aderopo; the photographs inside come from many hands, and the book is built as a collective record rather than one photographer’s survey.
The book has a distinct historical anchorage. Assembled as the worst of the pandemic receded, it registers a country still absorbing war in Europe, rising inflation and rising temperatures. What results is less a single argument than a broad and slightly unruly cross-section: faces photographed across Britain at a moment the book frames as one of resilience and reimagining — partly a reappraisal of a very recent past, partly an introduction to people who are, loudly or quietly, shaping what comes next.
Its structure follows the award. The shortlisted portraits are reproduced in full and paired with accompanying quotations, so that the images are not left to carry the argument alone. The award’s public life is part of the story too: the selected work travels the country on JCDecaux digital billboards, which means these portraits were made to be encountered in the street, at scale, by people who did not choose to look at them — a different contract from the one a gallery or a book normally offers.
For a collector, the interest lies less in scarcity than in the book’s position as a dated, recurring register. It is a numbered annual volume documenting a jury-shortlisted cross-section of British portraiture, published in a consistent format that invites comparison across years: who was photographed, how, and by whom, at a particular point in the country’s recent history. The physical production — hardback, cloth spine, uncoated paper — supports slow looking rather than display, and Volume 5 remains a useful, self-contained sample of a series whose value accumulates rather than arrives at once.
