Between the 2015 general election and the 2016 EU referendum, John Comino-James photographed demonstrations in towns and cities across the United Kingdom. The result, published by Dewi Lewis in 2017, is a 168-page hardback that ranges across causes as different as climate change, the renewal of Trident, the refugee crisis, austerity, Guantánamo, Palestine, Tibet, fracking and the fate of bees. Some of the gatherings he records are small; others fill streets by the tens of thousands. What holds the book together is less a single argument than a persistent attention to how conviction looks when it takes to the pavement.

The photographs are accompanied by reflective texts in which Comino-James draws on the language of banners and placards. Quoting that material directly, he builds a commentary on demonstration as a familiar yet under-examined feature of democratic life, and on the fact that much of it goes unreported by the mainstream press. He also asks readers not to mistake permission for guarantee: protest may be tolerated, even eased along, in one country and punished severely in another, and even where it is allowed it is watched. The book does not resolve that unease; it keeps it in view.

Comino-James is an experienced picture-maker, with seven earlier photographic books and exhibitions in the UK and Cuba to his name. Here the sequencing moves between the intimate and the massed, letting specific demands sit alongside the recurring theatre of public dissent. The volume itself is modestly proportioned at 22 by 29.8 centimetres.

For collectors of British documentary photography, the book is worth noting for its timing: it fixes a volatile stretch of recent political history as it was being lived, and it does so from the crowd rather than the podium. Its pairing of image and quoted speech gives the work a documentary texture that a picture-only treatment would lack.