Portrait of Britain Vol 4 gathers 200 portraits made across Britain at a moment of collective regrouping. Published in 2022 as the fourth volume in the collaborative series between the British Journal of Photography and Hoxton Mini Press, it asks what it means to live in Britain now through the faces and situations of people helping to redefine the country. The book is associated with 1854 Media’s annual Portrait of Britain award, whose selected photographs reach public audiences through digital billboards in stations, airports, shopping centres and high streets.
Its subject is national life seen at intimate scale. Rather than presenting Britain through a single authorised image, the collection brings together portraits selected from an open-call competition, allowing different photographers and different ways of looking to coexist. The resulting record is described through tenderness, playfulness and revelation: qualities that make room for both the quietly personal and the more visibly social. Jess Phillips contributes the introduction, while Sirli Raitma is identified as a photographer; the volume itself remains a broader collection rather than the work of one maker alone.
For a serious collector, the book’s interest lies in this combination of documentary breadth and editorial concentration. Two hundred individual portraits become a considered account of a society in transition, preserving not only appearances but the variety of identities, moods and encounters that a public photographic programme can bring together. Its relationship to a nationwide exhibition also gives the volume a distinctive cultural function: it carries images designed for shared civic visibility into the slower, more sustained setting of a book.
Issued by Hoxton Mini Press in English, this 336-page hardcover offers a substantial survey in a compact format. It is a useful object for readers concerned with contemporary British portraiture, photography’s public reach, and the ways an annual selection can accumulate into a portrait of a country.
