In a mining village in South Wales, a man named Tony pitched an arctic bell tent in the woods behind his own house and chose to sleep there. Nik Roche met him on the street, helped him find a forgotten bar and a beer waiting under his name, and kept returning for three years. The book that came out of that friendship is not a survey of hardship or a case study. It is a portrait made at close range, with the patience of someone who stayed.

Roche builds the sequence around Tony’s own account of his life: years spent in a cave in Nepal, earlier stretches in England and Ireland, and a return to Wales. Conversations between the two men run through the book, by turns darkly comic and plain, and they set the pitch for photographs that refuse to explain their subject. Animals move through the frame alongside him. The camp is improvised and inhabited, tended and contested. Nothing is arranged for the sake of a lesson.

What distinguishes the work is its refusal of the two registers that usually govern photographs of people living outside conventional arrangements: pity and romance. Roche gives us the rituals instead — the tent, the fire, the feeding, the small celebrations — and lets them accumulate into something like a household. The title carries the irony Tony’s neighbours might supply; the pictures carry the more complicated fact of a life that has been assembled, dismantled, and assembled again.

Dewi Lewis Publishing issues the book in hardback at 170 by 235mm, 136 pages, with 75 colour photographs, the photographs credited throughout to Roche. For collectors drawn to sustained documentary work, the appeal lies in the duration of the collaboration and in Roche’s willingness to let a friendship, rather than an argument, shape the book. It sits usefully beside other long-form British portraits of place, and it earns its place by not pretending to speak for Tony.