But among those working in such image-driven industries it is considered to be the most stingingly hip of

But among those working in such image-driven industries it is considered to be the most stingingly hip of all coffee-table bibles. To those outside the fashion and advertising worlds, Big magazine will mean very little. But among those working in such image-driven industries it is considered to be the most stingingly hip of all coffee-table bibles. Unlike the usual fleet of slickly manufactured glossies such as The Fashion (cover tag: "In Clothes We Trust"), Pop ("Hot Shiny Stuff"), and Wallpaper ("The Stuff That Surrounds You"), Big ­ impossible to pin down to one easy slogan, not that it would ever attempt to use one ­ is an independent, New York-based magazine, headed by Marcelo Junemann, a Chilean-born, Spanish-bred aesthete who prides himself on sourcing talent to push the boundaries, not just of fashion, but of photographic imagery in general. "I never wanted Big to be a straight fashion magazine," says Junemann, who launched the magazine 10 years ago in Madrid, well before the newsstands began to groan under the strain of quasi-fashion/art journals aimed at the self-conscious "thinking" style set. "Big has never been a mainstream magazine, like The Face or iD. I don't know whether we're cult, but we're certainly innovative, and that's difficult in the 21st century, to do something new," states Junemann.Big is unique in that every issue ­ there are 10 a year ­ is put together by a different editorial team in a different country, closely co-ordinated by Junemann over at Big HQ in New York. Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the UK and the US have all, at one time or another, documented trends in aesthetics by way of showcasing the cream of that particular country's talent.Past issues have focused on such intangible themes as "The Sublime", "Youth" and "Horror" ­ the cover of the last featured the model, Shalom Harlow, clasping her own "decapitated" head.

One issue centred on the work of controversial shutterbug Bob Richardson, the William Burroughs of fashion photography; another was devoted entirely to the king of fashion/advertising imagery, Nick Knight, who chose Big to publish his ground-breaking work of the 1990s. More recently, Big invited the Brazilian supermodel, Gisele Bundchen, to become its subject, the results of which were far from the sort of Pirelli-style pin-up shots one might expect, and included computer enhanced images of the bombshell as a 90-year-old.With no commercial restraints to speak of (fashion brands advertise and sponsor the magazine because they hope some kudos will rub off on their products, not because they expect editorial credits in return), Big has no problem in attracting the best, be they art directors, photographers, stylists or models, all of whom clamour to work for a magazine with few, if any rules."It's a dream commission," says Daren Ellis, the London-based art director who approached Junemann in New York with the concept for the latest issue. Junemann approved both the idea and, most importantly, Ellis, whose impressive credentials include art direction on style bibles Dazed & Confused, The Face and Arena Homme Plus. Together with the issue's editor, Mike Fordham (ex-features editor of Dazed & Confused), Ellis has produced Big: This England, which sets out to document tradition and clich?in contemporary English (as opposed to British) culture through a broad spectrum of literal and abstract photo-essays. "We've taken an entertaining, light-hearted approach that taps into aspects of England now," says Ellis, brandishing the cover image: a typical pub dart-board.Alongside personal essays by Ekow Eshun and Kevin Williamson ­ who question English identity from, respectively, a black Englishman's and a Scotsman's perspective ­ and Miranda Sawyer's tribute to the darker side of suburbs, you can see the work of some of the best image-makers in the business. For example, under the title "Rosie Lee", German photographer Thomas Mangold's images of apparently mundane tea-bags contain hidden jokes, with the grains of tea in each bag picking out the Thames estuary, Bristol's shoreline and the shape of India by way of a strategic tea stain.In "Heirs and Graces", another German photographer, Christian Lesemann, combines the Englishman's passion for voyeuristic paparazzi shots with traditional sport by spying through a long lens on the upper classes at work in London and at play (fox-hunting) in the country.

The French/Danish photographer, Cedric Buchet, travelled along the coast of Marbella to capture the English abroad but ended up with landscape shots, some beautiful, some ­ of moulding hotel windowsills ­ that look as though they might serve as evidence on a Watchdog programme. Meanwhile, Rob Wyatt (of Prada advertising fame) decided to record the goings-on at a pirate radio station "A friend of a friend of a friend knew this guy. We both pulled up in BMWs outside a Tube station; he got into my car and took us to this secret location, a disused warehouse. It was fairly intimidating turning up with £6,000 worth of equipment, particularly as you couldn't see a thing; it was so dark we had to use torches.

Most exciting, though," says Wyatt, "was shooting this guy putting up the aerial 20 floors up on the roof of a tower block, four miles away from the warehouse. The police remove the aerial about three times a month, so there was every chance of getting caught."What is so striking about Big: This England is the way those collaborators with fashion backgrounds (almost all of them) positively shrank from super-glossy fashion images and sank their teeth into reportage work instead. John Akehurst spent his weekends staked out in Camden taking striking portraits of cyber-goths. "I was dying to shoot them, but couldn't find another magazine interested in publishing them. It was great to be able to shoot people, straight off the street, with their own personal style, albeit stylised, rather than manufacture a fantasy image," he says.

Likewise, Tim Walker, whose work appears regularly in Italian Vogue, was only too happy to spend time on an animal sanctuary in Sussex or in the Devonshire countryside shooting a wild white-haired poet for his photo essay, "All Creatures Great and Small".It is, surely, a sign of these non-fashionable times that stylists, too, equally desperate to broaden their portfolios, chose hyper-real diary-style shoots over polished yet banal fashion productions of models in designer clothes. Jane How cast pupils from Sylvia Young's stage school for Richard Bush to photograph, which Ellis, after he saw the results, decided to call "Stars in their Eyes", after the television game show. Meanwhile, Anna Cockburn, perhaps the most influential of all fashion stylists, chose, with photographer Nigel Shaffran, to shoot a variety of garden centres ­ hardly the most obviously glamorous or fashionable of subjects.But Big: This England is not simply a record of English quirks and eccentricities. It is a telling document of the state of English fashion, which appears to be slipping further and faster into real life ­ where truth, the contributors discover, is indeed stranger than fiction. Just what sort of impact it will eventually have on the mainstream, only time will tell But be sure that it will have one.