Portrait of Humanity Vol 3 gathers two hundred photographs chosen from tens of thousands of entries to an open call run by 1854 Media, publisher of the British Journal of Photography. Hoxton Mini Press issued the volume in 2021 as a 320-page hardcover, the third in a series that began with Portrait of Britain and continued through the earlier Portrait of Humanity titles. No single photographer’s name governs the book. The pictures come from contributors working at every level and in many countries, and the collection is best read as an anthology rather than a monograph.
That structure is the point. Selection is deliberately unranked: established photographers and newcomers are judged by the same criteria, and the sequence moves between studio portraits, street encounters and domestic scenes without settling into a house style. What holds the book together is text. Each image is accompanied by a short account from the photographer, and those few sentences often do more work than a caption would — naming a relationship, a place, a reason for stopping. Picture and paragraph together give the volume a documentary temper that a gallery of portraits alone might not sustain.
The series grew out of an award and exhibition programme that travels internationally, and this instalment appeared during the isolation of the pandemic — a book of strangers’ faces assembled at a moment when faces were hard to see. That circumstance is part of its interest. The book argues, quietly and by accumulation rather than manifesto, that portraiture can hold difference and common ground at once.
For collectors the case is plain. This is a substantial hardcover: 320 pages, compact enough to hold, dense enough to reward slow reading, with an introduction by Otegha Uwagba. Its value lies in what it records — an annual cross-section of contemporary portrait practice, assembled by a photography institution and tied to an exhibition circuit that gave the work a public life beyond print. It is not presented as scarce, and it is not sold as an investment. It is a document, and for anyone building a shelf around contemporary portraiture, the volumes of this series sit usefully beside one another.
