Black Country Stories gathers work Martin Parr made over several years in the English region whose furnaces and foundries gave it a name. The commission came from Multistory, and the subject was, by Parr’s own account, largely unfamiliar to him: a densely settled post-industrial area often described in terms of decline. The book answers that reputation with a wider survey. Small factories and manufacturing businesses still working, temples, churches, shops, clubs and societies all enter the frame, alongside the ordinary circuitry of contemporary life — the Merry Hill Shopping Centre, a Tesco, bars and nightclubs, gyms, sports centres and spas. Communities of Polish, Sikh and Somali residents, among others, are part of the picture rather than a footnote to it.

The approach is recognisably Parr’s, but the emphasis falls differently here. Portraiture becomes a central preoccupation, an aspect of his practice that the publisher notes matured across this project. Just as important is the method behind the pictures: Parr returned to the idea of the community photographer, a role he had last taken up in the late 1970s in the Calder Valley. Prints went back to the people photographed, and the work was shown locally before travelling further.

The commission was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the New Art Gallery Walsall and Walsall Council, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Wolverhampton Council, Sandwell Council and Arts Council England, and the photographs were exhibited at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2014. Dewi Lewis Publishing issues the series as a 140-page hardback, 315 by 230mm, with 105 colour plates.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies in its place within Parr’s long engagement with social documentary and in the form of the project itself — an extended commission, a local first audience, and a body of portraiture that sits at the centre rather than the margin of the work.