In 2017, Merlin Daleman returned to the country of his birth after decades in the Netherlands. The West Midlands he had left behind was not the one he found: London had flourished, but the towns and cities of the economic North had been hollowed out, their factories replaced by foodbanks, barbershops and fading hopes. Mutiny gathers 123 photographs made across more than sixty places, from Aberdeen and Bangor to Blackpool, Belfast, Fife and Skegness. Daleman works on foot, quickly and without fuss, so the pictures carry the tempo of a passer-by. Boarded shopfronts and wet pavements appear alongside canals and bright seafront businesses; the people he meets register humour, warmth and stubborn community. The result is a portrait of a country whose divisions became starkly visible in the 2016 referendum, and of communities whose Leave vote Daleman describes as an act of defiance against a system they felt had ignored them.
The book’s essay belongs to journalist Niels Posthumus, who draws on an interview with the economic geographer Philip McCann. Its argument is uncomfortable and precise: hardly any other European country exhibits such a sharp geographical split between rich and poor. The economy of London, where national policy is made, is larger than those of the next fourteen largest British cities combined. Daleman’s photographs do not illustrate that statistic so much as give it a human texture. Published by GOST Books in 2025, Mutiny is a hardback of 256 pages, and its sequencing respects the pace of a journey rather than the logic of a survey. Nothing in the book insists on a single conclusion; the frustration and resilience it records are allowed to coexist.
For collectors attuned to documentary photography that thinks historically, Mutiny earns its place through sustained attention to a subject too often reduced to polling data. Daleman’s position as both native and returnee gives the work a double focus — intimate with the terrain, alert to its strangeness. It is a considered, unsentimental account of a fractured United Kingdom, made by a photographer who kept walking.
