In April 1992 Julian Germain knocked at the door of a terraced house on the south coast of England. Every other house on the street looked alike, he has recalled; this one was yellow and orange. Inside lived Charles Albert Lucien Snelling — Charlie — and for the next eight years Germain kept returning, photographing an old man alone with his flowers, his music, his crossword, his memories of his wife and children, and the albums of his own photographs that filled the house.

The pictures are not built on incident. Germain works in ordinary rooms and ordinary light, at the tempo of Charlie’s days, and the portrait accumulates out of domestic detail rather than drama: a chair, a windowsill, a garden, a face at ease with itself. Charlie’s life, as the photographs describe it, was organised around affection and repetition rather than acquisition, and the sequence holds to that register from beginning to end. It is a sustained act of attention, made over years, and its restraint is the point.

MACK first published the book in 2005, and it sold out soon afterwards; the third edition followed in November 2011. It is a cloth-bound hardback with a full-colour printed cover, 23.5 by 28 cm, containing forty-two colour plates. Germain, who lives and works in Northumberland, has shown internationally, including at The Photographers’ Gallery in London and MASP in São Paulo.

For a collector, the argument for the book lies in its duration and its discipline rather than in any claim about scarcity: eight years of looking at one life, edited into a sequence that never inflates its subject. Few photobooks about old age resist sentiment so completely, and fewer still keep being reissued. That a work this quiet has reached a third edition is worth noticing.