The big picture: Peter Dench’s toast to Derby day

Photographer Peter Dench has travelled the globe on assignment, but finds that home – England, its passions and people – is what he wants to shoot most. In 1998, having noticed how the English seemed to be “drinking longer, harder and more cheaply than before”, he began a project about the relationship between the nation and alcohol that would last a decade.

Dench grew up in Weymouth, where both his parents worked for Devenish brewery and the seafront would fill with revellers, so he was familiar with the nation’s addiction and its many incarnations. He immersed himself in day-long events, shot sparely on medium format film, hoped to both challenge and endorse cliches, and found that a truth emerges in the editing.

The result is at once artistic and anthropological, serious and funny, seedy and beautiful, filled with humour and humanity; “a laugh-out-loud romp through this often badly behaved nation, warts and all”, as Dench describes it.

Here, on Derby day 2001, primary colours catch the eye, as do the lines of the tablecloth, the edge of the pastel windbreak, the open car door, the slope of the field turned car park. The man in the rosy button-down and mustard-yellow cardigan lets out, we imagine, a full-throated laugh, his bright white teeth in a tidy row. He looks us in the eye as if to say: come on in and grab a glass.

Peter Dench’s work is part of the So British programme at the open-air La Gacilly Photo festival in Brittany, France, 1 June–5 October