Author: Iain McKell

We British are a peculiar sort. If William Oliver, writer of the foreword to Beautiful Britain, is to be believed our peculiarities are attributable to the unique set of difficult conditions our nation presents to us, be it climatic, economic or otherwise. These conditions, claims Oliver, make us ‘a creative country with culture instilled in its DNA’.

Iain McKell is a photographer drawn to the peculiar, or those ‘…that are really about a sense of self, about creativity and eccentricity.’ Beautiful Britain is a collection of his work over the past 35 years and documents a broad spectrum of Britishness, all with the common thread of eccentricity. His works remains personal no matter what the subject, offering and stark insight into cultures with which you may not be familiar – or, as McKell describes it, ‘people living under the surface of society’. 

This intimacy makes McKell’s work both unsettling and embracing at once, and makes Beautiful Britain a captivating collection of his past 35 years of very British documentary photography.