In 2008, while photographing an assignment for American Vogue at Tea & Sympathy, a British tearoom in Manhattan, Jason Bell learned that more than 120,000 Britons were living in New York City. That chance conversation with the owner, Nicky Perry, turned an expatriate’s passing curiosity into a sustained project. Bell, himself an Englishman resident in New York, spent the following period photographing the city’s British population across its full social range. An Englishman in New York, published by Dewi Lewis in 2010, is the result: a hardback volume of 156 pages containing sixty-five colour plates.

The subjects Bell gathered are deliberately heterogeneous. Taxi drivers and police officers appear alongside construction workers, divers, helicopter pilots and chefs; burlesque dancers, drug dealers, United Nations ambassadors and dog walkers widen the frame further. A second strand of the book considers Britons who have shaped the city’s cultural life: the writer Zoë Heller, who also introduces the volume, the director Stephen Daldry, the painters Cecily Brown and Bill Jacklin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director Thomas P. Campbell, the historian Simon Schama, the actor Kate Winslet and the musician Sting. Interviews conducted by Guy Harrington accompany the photographs, so that individual testimony sits beside the portraits rather than behind them.

What distinguishes the book is Bell’s refusal to treat his compatriots either as curiosities or as celebrities. Celebrated and uncelebrated figures receive comparable attention; the large format, nearly a foot wide, gives each encounter comparable weight. Bell’s background in portrait and editorial photography for Vanity Fair and Vogue informs the pictures’ composure, but the sequence, moving between the city’s institutions and its working lives, is less a roll call of the successful than a study of how Englishness is maintained, adapted or quietly discarded at a distance.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies in this double register. It is both a portrait of a diaspora and a record of a city at a particular moment, and it asks, through its subjects, what it means to be English and what it means to be a New Yorker. The photographs were made by Bell throughout; Guy Harrington contributes interviews and Zoë Heller the introduction.