Martin Parr made these photographs in Hong Kong in 2013, and GOST Books issued them the following year to accompany his first solo exhibition in the city, at Blindspot Gallery, which commissioned the work. The book’s subject is not Hong Kong as skyline or silhouette but Hong Kong as appetite and accumulation: shoppers from the mainland filling retail districts, racegoers and ballroom dancers, wet-market stalls, the crush of colour and commodity that daily life in one of the world’s most densely populated places produces.

The approach will be familiar to anyone who has followed Parr’s social documentary work, though the subject gives it unusual velocity. His interest in consumption, leisure, food culture and eccentricity, pursued for decades in Britain and elsewhere, finds in Hong Kong a subject that seems to meet the camera halfway. These are not contemplative pictures. They record the sheer volume of things, of people, of surfaces, and they do so with Parr’s characteristic mixture of satire and affection, a tone that resists both condescension and sentimentality.

The book’s construction is part of its argument. A vinyl flexi-cover holds 112 pages, and a separate 24-page booklet is bound in, so that the sequence arrives in two registers rather than one continuous sweep. The design suits a city that has always been described in terms of density and layering; the structure echoes the argument the photographs make. Everything here is credited to Parr, and the physical book was shaped in collaboration with Blindspot Gallery, the exhibition venue.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies at this intersection: a major British photographer working at speed and close range in a city that suited his preoccupations, issued as a modest, thoughtfully assembled object by an independent publisher. The exhibition gave the project a specific time and place, and the book preserves that occasion while standing on its own as a body of work.