Ricky Adam’s first book opens with a refusal: it is not a book about BMX, and not a book about punk. What it gathers instead are photographs of people who do their own thing their own way and live from the heart whatever it costs them. Bikes, boards, basements and wrecked equipment belong to the scenery of those lives, not to their argument.

Adam came to the subject from inside it, having spent years within the same DIY punk and underground youth scenes he photographs, and that position shapes the work. Faces are met at eye level and at close range, in the middle of things, rather than surveyed from a safe distance. Skateboarding, punk and BMX are usually documented either as sport or as nostalgia; here they read as a shared social world, self-built and self-policed, with its own humour and its own quiet passages.

Holy Land Pros published the book in 2012 as a first edition: a hardcover of 184 pages, trimmed wider than it is tall, so that a spread can hold both the rider and the crowd pressing around him. Adam is credited as the photographer throughout, and this is his first work in book form. Library catalogues place it between photography, individual photographers, lifestyles and cultural anthropology, which is roughly where it belongs — closer to the photobook’s zine ancestry than to the coffee-table survey.

For a collector, the interest lies in watching a photographer work within a community rather than across it. The sequencing, the alternation of portraits and fragments, and the sustained attention to people who are usually photographed only mid-motion give the book its texture. The first edition is the form in which that record was first put into circulation, and it remains the version that carries the project’s original context intact.

After the initial appearance, the title was kept alive by the photographer and by specialist booksellers rather than absorbed into a mass reprint programme, so copies tend to be found through people who know the scenes it documents. That circulation is itself part of the story: a book about doing things yourself, moving the way its subjects move.