John Chillingworth was twenty-two when he joined the staff of Picture Post, the British illustrated magazine launched in October 1938 and published for almost twenty years, until 1957. At its peak it had a circulation of just under two million copies. He was the youngest member of the magazine’s ‘star’ team of photographic journalists, working alongside Bert Hardy, Kurt Hutton, Felix Man, Bill Brandt, Thurston Hopkins, Grace Robertson and Leonard McCombe. Chillingworth stayed with Picture Post for seven years, and the picture stories he produced in that period form the core of this book.

The magazine was liberal, anti-Fascist and populist in editorial outlook, and its range was correspondingly broad: politics, sport, fashion, music, theatre and film, as well as picture stories of everyday life in the UK and abroad. Encouraged by the editor Tom Hopkinson, Chillingworth learned to combine ‘story-telling’ images with the written word and worked with some of the finest magazine journalists of the age. Hopkinson described him as one of his great successes.

Picture Post Photographer is Chillingworth’s first monograph, gathering a wide range of photographs primarily taken during his Picture Post years. Although his images are still reproduced in publications around the world, this volume is the first sustained presentation of his work as a body. The book is introduced by Matthew Butson, vice president of the Hulton Archive, whose experience of the Picture Post archive stretches back almost thirty years.

Published by Dewi Lewis in 2013, the book is a 96-page hardback, 245mm square, with 76 colour and black-and-white photographs. It offers a considered view of a photographer whose reputation has rested largely on the pages of the magazine itself, and an opportunity to read that work as a coherent whole rather than as isolated frames.