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Trapped in time? Britain and nostalgia in pictures | Art and design

Trapped in time? Britain and nostalgia – in pictures

Photographer Ian Howorth explores his feelings about his adoptive home country with images that bring the past and present together all at once

Main image: Hanging with the telephones … a graveyard of phone boxes. Photograph: Ian Howorth

Tue 2 May 2023 02.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 17 Aug 2023 08.37 EDT

  • Wetlands

    ‘A Country Kind of Silence continues my internal exploration of feelings surrounding my sense of identity,’ says Ian Howorth. ‘A sense that belonging isn’t as unattainable as it is hard to grasp. England has been my adoptive home for some time now, 26 years to be exact.’ A Country Kind of Silence is available though Setanta Books. All photos: Ian Howorth

  • Always

    You can read more about this image in the Observer’s big picture feature

  • Row of Chairs at Tables Against a Wooden Background

    Britishness is a collage of cross-cultural signifiers. Complex and simple, sad and beautiful, known and forgotten. Things that have their own language, their own patterns of tradition and ritual that intermingle with the day-to-day of basic need

  • Shae Margate

    We see in so many moments a vision of Britishness easy to acknowledge. But that validation is becoming more polarised with each decision we make to embrace or ignore, rather than understand, the reasons for flag-waving when so few have the means to get by

  • Uley

    Our value as individuals may be inherently linked to our homes, houses, cars, footpaths and places of leisure, but our collective identity as Britons has been forced to feed on a romanticised past

  • Anglia

    This is a Britain of distant summers. Of longing. Of homesickness for somewhere never visited; for a place that never existed but can be felt deeply and almost seen, somewhere far out to sea

  • Mr Foxy Man

    What is captured here is something without physicality; something supernatural

  • Goody Gumdrops

    Howorth says: ‘Moving from where my heart is rooted has had a profound effect on me. Feelings of unease and uncertainty have always been with me and many of these are tied to the constant changes I see in my surroundings. These developments have often mirrored a change in myself as time’s gone by. I wanted A Country Kind of Silence to be a response to this change – of perception and my personal sense of self. The urban landscape is born entirely from our creation and it tells us so much’

  • DS

    In A Country Kind of Silence, the artist questions linearity by exhibiting time as multi-layered, so that past and present exist together, all at once

  • Yarmouth Cafe

    Currently based in Brighton and working almost exclusively in analogue film, Howorth’s eye is magnetised by the sometimes kitsch nature of the UK’s seaside towns

  • Table and Chairs Against a Spotty Wall

    While nostalgia reigns, modernisation cannot be completed, and therein lies the contradiction of Great Britain – why attempt it at all? Some of the places featured in A Country Kind of Silence remain locked, physically, in their pasts, but retain the same functionality

  • Phone Boxes

    Contemporary Britain is enveloped in a cultural nostalgia that has engulfed all facets of life, from departments of state and local authorities, to marginalised and rural communities squeezed by cuts and forgotten
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