The Edward Hopper of the Black Country: Billy Dosanjh's Walsall photographs

It was bitter in Walsall that winter of 1962-3 when snow turned the Black Country white. In After the Storm, Billy Dosanjh’s reconstruction of one especially chilly night, an elderly Sikh man, recently arrived from the Punjab, stands under an old carriage lamp, seemingly seeing snow for the first time.

“I thought it was quite a fitting note to get him gazing at the snow, looking a little bewildered,” Dosanjh says, while furnace smoke stacks rise at the back of the image like ghostly markers of an industrial past. Dosanjh recruited real-life locals to inhabit these scenes, working from oral memories gathered with a National Heritage Lottery Fund grant.

He hunted down era-appropriate details — Vimto ads, period cars, hand-painted signs — even noting that “there was actually a market here that sold monkeys, pythons and rat snakes,” a recreated sign explaining that the last would set you back £12. The resulting pictures read as if made by a Black Country Edward Hopper or a more politically overt Jeff Wall.

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