Another country?

All photographers love to travel and make work in exotic places. Why not? It’s work and surrogate holiday in one. But it’s a truism to say that the best work done by a country’s photographers is documenting their homeland, or adopted homeland. That’s where they have the biggest stake. So a history of postwar British documentary photography is a history of the country through specific eyes. Which is why the book is titled Another Country. It is not, and can never be an impartial view. And although a ‘documentary’ view, it is actually a complicated fiction, although that in general means a fiction aiming to tell a truth.

But what is ‘documentary’ photography? The traditional view is that it is inherently ‘straight’ photography – the photographer observes and reports on something, thus making a record of society. But many photographers talk about society in their work, fabricating