First published in 2023, *Arcadia* is a series of photographs by Ian Howorth whose title borrows from a centuries-old idea: the fertile, fictional countryside that artists, poets and playwrights once held up as an image of individual paradise. Howorth takes that inherited framework and turns it toward something more private, asking what “home” means to someone who relocated many times as a child before settling in Britain and who has often felt himself an outsider there.
His subject is the ordinary scenery of that search. The photographs move from the seaside towns of the south, serene if not metronomic, to Working Men’s Clubs and forgotten factories in the north, tracing a Britain suffocated by its past. Working on film, Howorth applies a deliberately retro register to these places, and the resulting nostalgia is not simply fond; it keeps pressing on preconceived ideas of beauty and leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
This second edition is a clothbound hardback of 128 pages and 61 images, measuring 293 by 198 mm, and is credited in full to Howorth as photographer. The horizontal page format suits the wide, quiet views that recur through the sequence, giving the book the feel of a considered body of work rather than a gathering of single pictures. It was published by Setanta Books as an English-language edition. A special edition with prints has also been issued: each print is in an edition of 25 numbered and stamped copies, printed on Hahnemühle Pearl paper at 27 x 19 cm with a 0.5 cm white border, and signed by Howorth on the verso.
For a collector, the argument for *Arcadia* rests less on any claim about scarcity than on the coherence of its project. Howorth is working within an established British tradition of photographing the overlooked everyday, yet he brings to it a personal stake, the unsettled question of belonging, that gives the pictures their tension. The subject, the film technique, and the book’s own pacing are of a piece, and that consistency is what gives the volume its lasting interest.
