The Bookshelf - #2 - This Pleasant Land

Hoxton Mini-Press (Written by Rosalind Jana)

This Pleasant Land - New Photography of The British Landscape

Available on Amazon from £22.14

Welcome back to episode of my short blogs about some of my favourite photobooks. This week we are looking at This Pleasant Land (Hoxton Mini Press), which takes a fresh look at British landscape photography.

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One of the first things you notice about this book is the way it looks, the sage green cover makes you feel calm when you see it and the front cover image (shot by Toby Coulson) gives a really good idea of what is contained within the pages of this rather weighty, beautifully produced and bound collection of photographs.

I should have probably said collections, plural, rather than collection, because this book contains sets of images which are projects that have been gathered together from 24 photographers to make this book, which puts a new, often irreverent perspective on landscape photography of the British Isles. The images have been gathered over the course of 20 (ish) year period, so This Pleasant Land, published in 2023, provides a great look at post millennial Britain.

All of the photos are presented on what I would call a semi gloss-type paper and it really suits the look and feel of the images that are contained within.

The book opens with a beautifully written introduction/short essay from Jana, who sets out what she has hoped to achieve with the book and gives the whole project and the concept of landscape photography some real clarity, right from the outset. In it she talks about “an initial moment of open air absorption”, which is something we are familiar with as landscape photographers and that feeling is emanating from these pages.

The other promise that this book delivers on is that photographers have been able to “present their time bound view of this nation’s terrain. From its meadows and mountains, to scrap heaps and amusement arcades, its winding, mineral rich rivers and woods to the far-fetching fens… the bleak, the uncontainable and the marginal”. The book does that well, even on first glance but when you get to spend some time with it, you will see that it really does it.

This book avoids of the usual tropes/cliches that we tend to find in so many landscape photography books, this is particularly evident when you look at the section of the book presented by Sarah Pickering entitled “Explosions” in which she photographs pyrotechnic simulations and how these kinds of things can blur the line between entertainment and violence. It takes on even more meaning when you read the words that accompany it. I won’t quote them here, I will leave them for you to discover.

One of my personal highlights is Man on the Shore by Jem Southam. There’s something about it that feels reminiscent of Another Place on Crosby Beach—though this figure stands alone, which gives it a very different emotional weight.

For me, this doesn’t feel like a traditional landscape photography book at all. It feels much closer to a curated collection of fine art photography—diverse, contemporary, and quietly challenging.

This is absolutely one for the coffee table of any landscape photographer, and it would make a great gift as well.

Prices correct as of 3.30pm 01/04/2026

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