Roving photographers Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale are back with their third book in the bestselling Is Britain Great? series.

Since 2000 The Caravan Gallery has travelled extensively in the UK and abroad documenting the reality and surreality of ‘the way we live today’. Photos of places visited form the basis of a constantly changing exhibition in this unique mobile exhibition venue and mini social club on wheels.

Williams and Teasdale’s burgeoning archive depicts a land of contrast and contradiction that somehow manages to look both endearingly familiar and terrifyingly alien. ‘You couldn’t make it up’, ‘I’ve lived here all my life and never noticed that’ and ‘I wish I’d had my camera with me’ are typical responses to Caravan Gallery photos.

The Caravan Gallery presents a thought provoking, sometimes tragicomic, view of Britain where individuality, defiance and absurdity flourish in the face of homogenisation and piecemeal regeneration schemes. Williams and Teasdale manage to find ‘beauty in the squalor’, glimmers of hope in the most unpromising situations and are happy to report that humour is alive and well.

Published by Cornerhouse, in association with The Caravan Gallery, this third book in the series features essays from Sara-Jayne Parsons (Exhibitions Curator at the Bluecoat, Liverpool) and Dan Thompson (founder of the Empty Shops Network and co-founder of Culture on Wheels).

Staff Recommendation

Signed Copies Available

Publisher's Description
Martin Parr has become well known for his collections of photography books and postcards, but he is also a jackdaw collector of photographic and other themed objects. Some collections have already achieved notoriety – for instance his collection of Saddam Hussein watches (wrist watches featuring photographs of Saddam Hussein, highly popular in Iraq prior to his downfall), and his collection of photographic trays, both exhibited at the 2004 Rencontres d’Arles festival in southern France – but until now they have not been published in book form. This comprehensive account of eccentric objects collected by Parr over 25 years includes his memorabilia of political leaders and movements (Lenin, Margaret Thatcher and the Miner’s strike, for example), other mythologized characters (Osama bin Laden and the Spice Girls), his collections of photographic trays and kitsch wall paper, objects commemorating the M1 motorway, 9/11, and the Sputnik mission. Ranging between the banal and poignant, they are always hilarious.

Publisher: Chris Boot


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Publisher's Description
Justin Quinnell has used his mouth as a pinhole camera. The results are surreal, revealing and hilarious.

He captures on film his visit to the dentist; portraits of friends and family; snakes, tortoises, alligators and angry cats; the everyday acts of having a bath, cleaning his teeth and eating his dinner. Perhaps even more surreal though are his landscape photographs – icons of world travel, they include Sydney Opera House, Hong Kong, St Marks Square in Venice, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and the Lincoln Memorial in Washingon.

A one-time Parliamentary and European Election Candidate, Justin has tirelessly promoted pinhole photography for over twenty years. A recognised expert in the subject, he regularly lectures in the UK and abroad. A committed Green Party member he has also acted as publicist for a number of organisations including the National Cycle Network and World Pinhole Day. His CV also includes a period acting as liaison contact with Maasai tribesmen over local issues, whilst working at a safari camp in Kenya.

Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
Size: 150 x 115mm
96 pages, 60 photographs

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Publisher's Description
Martin Parr is a key figure in the world of photography and contemporary art. Some accuse him of cruelty, but many more appreciate the wit and irony with which he tackles such subjects as bad taste, food, the tourist, shopping and the foibles of the British. Parr has been collecting postcards for twenty years, and here is the cream of his collection his boring postcards. With no introduction or commentary of any kind, Parr’s boring postcards are reproduced straight: they are exactly what they say they are, namely boring picture postcards showing boring photographs of boring places presumably for boring people to buy to send to their boring friends. All of them are shot in Britain, taking us on a boring tour of its motorways, ring roads, traffic interchanges, bus stations, pedestrian precincts, factories, housing estates, airports, caravan sites, convalescent homes and shopping centres. Some attempt to idealize their subjects, only to fail dismally. Others lack any apparent purpose or interest … but the resultant collection of photographic images is wholly compelling. Boring Postcards is multi-layered: a commentary on British architecture, social life and identity, a record of a folk photography which is today being appropriated by the most fashionable photographers (including Parr), an exercise in sublime minimalism and, above all, a richly comic photographic entertainment.

Publisher: Phaidon Press
Size: 150 x 210mm
176 pages, 120 colour & 35 b/w illustrations