Ken Grant’s The Close Season was made over a fifteen-year period, and its subject is the Liverpool community in which he was born. The photographs follow a port city whose industrial river-trades were slipping away into history, leaving lives that were improvised and uncertain. Away from the workplace as the defining fact of existence, Grant dwells on togetherness and the intimate encounters of family life. A story by the novelist James Kelman accompanies the pictures.

James Kelman is one of the UK’s leading novelists and won the 1994 Booker Prize for his novel How Late It Was, How Late. His contribution gives the sequence a second voice, and the pairing of a photographer’s long documentary commitment with a fiction writer’s attention to vernacular speech is one of the book’s distinguishing features.

The Close Season is a hardback of 104 pages, published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2002. The volume measures 300 by 245 millimetres and contains fifty-eight duotone photographs. Its generous format invites close attention to the family scenes and everyday encounters described by the publisher. The publisher describes the book as bearing witness to the tender urgencies of kinship and survival; Martin Parr’s remark points to a plainness of address — no hidden agendas, no exploitation, simply a short cut to knowing what it was like to be there.

For readers of British documentary photography, the book belongs to a line of long-form urban work, and its interest lies in the patience of its making and the coherence of its editing. Grant’s relationship to the Liverpool material, rooted in autobiography according to the publisher, gives the sequence its particular weight.