In 2011, the Archive of Modern Conflict commissioned Bruce Gilden to photograph London, and the resulting book, A Complete Examination of Middlesex, is not a survey of a county so much as an interrogation of the street portrait. Gilden, a member of Magnum Photos since 1998, works here in both colour and black and white, and the alternation keeps the viewer off balance. The palette shifts, but the approach does not: faces, eyes, and gestures are caught close and hard, with a directness that can feel confrontational and tender at once. The title borrows the language of the old Middlesex county, yet the place is present mainly through its inhabitants, whose diversity is registered one encounter at a time. Gilden has said he looks for people whose faces, and particularly eyes, scream a story; the photographs are built on that exchange.
The book was published by the Archive of Modern Conflict in 2013, and this is the first edition. At 104 pages and roughly 22.5 by 33.5 centimetres, it is a substantial hardback, sized to give full weight to portraits that rarely ask for polite distance. What distinguishes the collection is not simply Gilden’s signature proximity but the sequencing of colour and monochrome, which sets up a rhythm of confrontation and reflection across the London streets. The archive’s commission gives the project a documentary frame, yet the images resist tidy sociology. They are portraits in the strict sense: intimate, full-on, and dependent on the photographer’s ability to see the essence of a character, a place, or a moment.
For collectors, the appeal lies in the conjunction of a committed photographer, a specific commission, and a book that has become a concentrated example of Gilden’s street practice. It is not a retrospective or a greatest-hits volume; it is a focused body of work made in one city under one invitation, and its first-edition status as published by AMC is documented. The large format and hardback binding suit the photographs’ intensity, and the 104 pages allow the sequence to build without dilution. Anyone interested in the street portrait, in London as photographic subject, or in the Archive of Modern Conflict’s publishing programme will find this a considered addition.
