In July 2013, a nail-packed bomb detonated near the Kanzul Iman mosque in Tipton, West Midlands; only a mistaken calculation about the hour of Friday prayers prevented mass casualties. The attack belonged to a sequence of violence around mosques in Walsall and Wolverhampton, and to the charged atmosphere that followed the murder of Mohammed Saleem. Mahtab Hussain’s The Quiet Town of Tipton begins from these events, but it is not a book about the bomber. Its subject is the town itself, and the Pakistani families who made their homes there after the Second World War, arriving to work in Black Country factories and gradually exchanging the plan of return for settled lives, houses and mosques in England.
The book, published by Dewi Lewis in 2015 at 96 pages with 56 colour plates, was commissioned by Multistory as part of an ongoing documentary project on Sandwell and the Black Country, a programme that has also commissioned photographers including Martin Parr, Mark Power and Bruce Gilden to work with local residents on everyday life. That provenance matters. Hussain’s photographs were made inside a community under duress, and he attends to the ordinary continuities of that community rather than to the spectacular fact of the bombing.
Hussain’s practice, which has been described as articulating a visual language that challenges prevailing concepts of multiculturalism, centres on the relationship between identity, heritage and displacement. In a compact hardback of roughly 17 by 24.5 centimetres, the sequencing holds portraiture and place together, letting a post-industrial town and its residents speak in the same register. The result is a record of a specific Midlands locality that resists both sensationalism and abstraction.
For collectors, the book’s interest lies in this combination: a photographer with a sustained inquiry into British Muslim identity, a commissioning context rooted in place, and a subject with national resonance. It is a considered document of a town often described only through its worst week.
