Colin Gray’s In Sickness and In Health is the closing volume of The Parents, a photographic project he sustained over decades. Published by SteidlMACK and co-published with steidlMACK, London, the book gathers the final stages of a record that begins in the family home and ends in hospitals, churches and the routines of care.

Gray started photographing his parents in the 1960s, at five years old, with a square box Brownie Twin and permission to expose one frame of a single roll at family occasions, holidays and celebrations. What accumulated over the following decades is less a curated family album than an incremental account of two people loving, working, homemaking and playing — ordinary life registered at the pace at which it was lived.

The last movement, begun in 2000, follows deterioration. Hospital and church visits become more frequent, ailments more serious, the drugs regime more complex. Gray’s father takes on the role of carer; Gray finds that photographing helps him make sense of the loss unfolding in front of him. The camera does not stand outside the family here — it is one of the ways the family copes.

What distinguishes the book is time. Gray has now reached the age his parents were when he began, and sees their history in his own future. That doubled position — son as witness, son as successor — gives the sequence a weight a shorter project could not carry, and makes its intimacy unusually exposed rather than sentimental.

Born in Hull in 1956, Gray studied photography at the Royal College of Art, London, and lives and works in Glasgow. His work has been exhibited at Kunsthal, Rotterdam; Encontros da Imagem, Braga; the House of Photography, Prague; and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. For collectors drawn to long-form documentary, the interest lies in the duration of the undertaking and in the closing of a sustained narrative arc.