Fierce Tea is the first book by the London-born photographer Jack Webb, published by Dewi Lewis in 2000 with support from the Arts Council of England. Its subject is Jaisen, who calls himself a performance artist and lives in Blyth, a small town in the North East of England. Alone, or with his brother and friends, Jaisen stages events that Webb describes as strongly ritualistic, deeply surreal and anarchistic. Webb photographs these performances not as a detached observer but as someone caught up in their momentum; he speaks of the urgency in the way Jaisen works, as though the activity were a necessity rather than a choice.

The book takes its title from what it calls Fierce Tea Theory: the idea, held by Jaisen and those around him, that they are the product of an environment for which they were never qualified, and that their art is a way of adapting to the gloom around them. That premise gives the pictures their double edge. Webb’s colour photographs are frequently funny, and the enterprise has a genuine comic charge, but the laughter sits close to loss. The publisher warns plainly that this is no straightforward documentary, that all is not what it seems, and that things are not necessarily going to be alright in the end. The sequence bears that out, moving between absurdity and a persistent sense of potential tragedy without resolving the tension.

The book is modest in size—roughly 18 by 24 centimetres, 104 pages, hardback—and contains around sixty colour photographs. Its scale suits the intimacy of the material; this is a sustained encounter with a few people in a particular place rather than a survey. Webb, who was born in 1973 and has combined personal projects with lighting work on fashion and commercial assignments, made these pictures close to home, and the book retains the feel of work made from within a circle rather than from outside it.

For collectors, the interest lies in what the book does with its subject rather than in any claim about its status. It belongs to a strain of British photography that treats eccentricity and marginal lives without condescension, and it complicates the documentary contract by refusing to separate the comic from the elegiac. Its publication by Dewi Lewis, with Arts Council support, places it within a specific moment of British photobook publishing. Read closely, it rewards attention as a study in tone: how photographs can hold hilarity and foreboding in the same frame.