Apiary is Robin Friend’s second book, published by Loose Joints in 2021, and it returns to terrain he has made his own: the British landscape as something unsettled, watched, and strange. Where his earlier Bastard Countryside worked in daylight, this series is nocturnal and edged with apocalypse. Its subject is Lewes, a town in South East England whose Guy Fawkes’ Night festivities — wild, bacchanalian, and rooted in the commemoration of a failed act of extreme political terrorism — give the work its occasion rather than its meaning. Friend is not documenting folklore. Cropping tight, intensifying detail, and holding the crowd and the individual in tension, he produces images that read closer to riots and insurrection than to seasonal custom.
What distinguishes the book is the way it treats night as an instrument rather than an atmosphere. The darkness makes a shadow space of the town, and within it questions of democracy, identity, and cohesion appear stretched toward breaking point. The unrest, inequality, and instability that ripple around the British Isles are felt here as reflections rather than reported events — a contemporary mood rendered obliquely, through bodies in motion and the push and pull between collective and solitary presence.
Loose Joints has given the sequence a correspondingly deliberate form: 132 pages at 250 × 250 mm, with 60 tritone plates in an embossed quarter-bound hardcover. The square format and the tritone printing serve the intensified detail of the photographs, while the binding gives a book about collective ritual the weight of an object meant to be handled and returned to. It was launched in November 2021 at The Photographer’s Gallery Bookshop in London.
For collectors, the case rests on the work itself and its place in a sustained project. Friend, born in 1983 and based in London, has exhibited at Aperture in New York, Christie’s in Paris, and the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Somerset House, and the Royal Academy in London, alongside commissioned and collaborative projects. Apiary follows Bastard Countryside as a further chapter in his reading of the British landscape, and it stands as one of the more distinctive nocturnal books to come from a British publisher in recent years.
