Ian Howorth’s second monograph, A Country Kind of Silence, was published by Setanta Books in 2023 with an essay by Harry Gallon. Across 156 pages and 85 images, the photographer continues an inquiry into identity and belonging that has shaped his work as a Peruvian/British photographer based in Brighton. The book’s title names its method as much as its mood: a quiet, watchful attention to the ordinary surfaces of English towns.

Howorth writes that England has been his adoptive home for twenty-six years, and that questions about where he is from still give him pause. The photographs answer indirectly, through the visual evidence of place: the pink and blue hues of a Kent high street, the faded-peach tones of a Brightonian hairdresser’s shopfront, hand-stenciled signage in Great Yarmouth. These are not landmarks but the unremarked fabric of daily life, and the book treats them as cultural symbols to which a sense of self might be anchored.

The project is also an argument about time. Development and decay run alongside one another; familiar sites survive, struggle, or simply continue to exist, and their dilapidation often stands out only where new construction appears beside them. Howorth frames the sequence as a response to change in both his surroundings and himself, a way of holding still a transitional period before its tropes are lost or forgotten.

The book’s design supports this register: a 240 by 280 mm hardcover with dust jacket, large enough for the photographs’ muted palettes to read clearly. Gallon’s accompanying essay provides a second voice, while the photographer’s own statement sets out the terms of the inquiry. For collectors drawn to contemporary British photography concerned with landscape, identity, and the passage of time, this is a considered and coherent statement by a photographer working at a deliberate pace.