In 2013 Bruce Gilden spent three weeks in the English Midlands, photographing the people, factories and houses of a region long defined by industry and now reshaped by its decline. Black Country, published by Setanta Books in 2022, gathers that work into a single sustained encounter with post-industrial Britain. Gilden’s subjects are the overlooked and the marginalised: residents of neglected communities, and the trades and convictions that are quietly leaving the historical record. The book’s aim is not nostalgia but attention, directed at lives and forms of work that contemporary society tends to pass by.

The photographs are presented at scale. Fifty-seven images run across 180 pages, interrupted by six gatefolds that open the sequence beyond the single spread. Two different paper stocks separate one register of the book from another, and the saturated colour for which this work is known pushes the pictures forward rather than letting them settle into documentary distance. The design extends the subject matter rather than decorating it: stainless steel screws hold the volume together in the manner of a factory manual, while a cover printed silver on black paper echoes the worn doors of warehouses and workshops. What the reader opens is an industrial document whose contents are people.

For collectors, the interest lies in how completely the object argues its own case. The binding, the cover treatment, the paper changes and the gatefolds are not incidental production details; they carry the book’s thinking about labour, obsolescence and the texture of the region. Gilden is credited as the photographer throughout, and the pictures are unmistakably his. This is a considered monograph in which subject, sequence and physical form are held to a single standard, and it rewards the kind of reading that a shelf of ordinary photobooks does not invite.