Portrait of Humanity Vol 4 collects two hundred portraits, chosen from thousands of submissions to an open award run by 1854 Media, the company behind the British Journal of Photography. Entrants came from many countries and from every level of experience; the book is what survives once the jury has finished — a single year’s argument about what a photographic portrait can still do.
The organising premise is stated plainly in the subtitle, 200 Photographs That Capture the Changing Face of Our World. The selection leans toward intimate, close-range work: people photographed by people who can say who they are. Each picture is printed with a short account by its maker, so the volume reads as a sequence of paired statements rather than an anthology of images alone. The subjects span continents and generations, and the recurring note, in the publisher’s phrasing, is courage, hardship and hope.
The book also documents a circuit. The award is annual, and its winners and shortlisted photographers are exhibited — at the Indian Photo Festival in Hyderabad, for instance, and at PHOTO 2022 in Melbourne — which gives the printed volume a second life as the permanent record of a temporary showing. An introduction by Rachel Segal Hamilton opens the sequence.
Hoxton Mini Press issues it as a 320-page hardcover of roughly twenty by sixteen centimetres, in the same line as Portrait of Britain. The format is deliberately unmonumental: small enough to hold, dense enough to reward repeated looking, and built for reading as much as for display. The Telegraph included it in its 2022 round-up of the year’s photography books.
For a collector, the case for this volume rests on scope rather than scarcity. It is a jury-selected cross-section of contemporary portraiture assembled in one year, with the photographers’ own words attached — useful as a benchmark against later volumes in the series, and as a compact record of what a worldwide open call looked like in 2022.
