The post-war period was a golden age for photography in Britain: it marked the apogee of the illustrated press with magazines such as Life and Picture Post, the birth of Magnum (the first independent photographic agency) in 1947, and the emergence of documentary photographers working with a new artistic freedom.

This book explores photography from the first year of post-war peace to 1979 (a year that saw the election of Margaret Thatcher, the siege of the American Embassy in Tehran and the first black-led government of Rhodesia/Tanzania in 90 years). This is arguably the most memorable, and yet tumultuous, epoch in history; a time of hope and change for many as Europe’s empires collapsed in Africa and Asia, and simultaneously a time of pain and new oppressions during the Civil Rights and Cold War eras. Britain in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was changed indelibly: shaped by de-colonization and mass immigration; by de-industrialization at home; and by the struggle for new economic and political influence abroad after the collapse of the empire.

Including work by celebratory photographers such as Lee Miller, Bill Brandt, Philip Jones-Griffiths, Larry Burrows, Margaret Bourke-White, Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Goldblatt, this book will also shine a light on lesser-known yet no-less-exceptional photographers such as Homai Vyarawalla, Rashid Talukdar, Ernest Cole (‘Kole’), Bandele ‘Tex’ Ajetunmobi, Fan Ho, Thurston Hopkins, Shirley Baker and Paul Trevor.