English summers are short, and the country has never stopped remarking on it. Chanel Irvine made the photographs in *An English Summer* between 2020 and 2022, years when ordinary pleasures were interrupted and then, for many people, noticed again with unusual sharpness. She travelled from Kent to Devon, from Cornwall to Shropshire, and what she brought back is less a survey of places than an account of a mood: heat resting in a field, a coast at the end of the afternoon, the awareness that the season is already leaving.

The method is deliberately unspectacular. Irvine points her camera at things any English viewer would recognise and asks them to hold still long enough to become strange again — a garden, a road, a stretch of water, light on a wall. The work sits knowingly inside a long domestic tradition of landscape picture-making, and the title carries its own irony, since the season is at once a national joke and a real source of feeling. Rosalind Jana supplies an introduction that frames the sequence; the photographs are left to do most of the arguing.

Hoxton Mini Press published the book in 2022 as a 112-page hardcover, measuring roughly 24 by 29 centimetres. That landscape proportion suits the material: a single image can fill a page, and pictures can run across a spread without design intruding on them.

For a collector, the argument is concentration rather than scarcity. This is a tightly dated body of work — three years, one country, one emotional register — by a photographer whose career is still forming, and its subject is the thing notoriously hard to photograph well: transience. Irvine mostly resists the obvious sentimentality. Anyone assembling a shelf of recent British landscape photography, or watching what independent publishers have done with the form, will find it belongs there.

Six sentences of context, then pictures that trust the reader. That is the whole proposition, and it holds.