‘Edward Hopper of the Black Country’: the photographer whose epic shots captured Sikh life in Walsall | Photography

IThe winter of 1962-63 was bitter in Walsall when snow turned the black town white. In After the Storm, Billy Dosanjh reconstructs epic photographs of a bitterly cold night at that time, in which an elderly Sikh man, recently arrived from Punjab, stands under an old carriage lamp. The shot indicates that he is seeing snow for the first time.

“I thought it was quite appropriate to have him staring at the snow, looking a little puzzled,” says Dosanjh as we wander through Paths You Walk, an exhibition of photographs, films and art installations at New Art Gallery Walsall. In the back of the image, three piles of furnace smoke rise ghostly, just as the three crosses on Golgotha ​​were transported to Mordor.

As in the picture, these chimneys disappeared with the decline of industrialization in Britain and the black country turned into a green country. In the 1960s, Punjabi men would come to these kilns to do work that white Britons didn’t seem to want.

Like others posting this and other images in the show, the lonely man caught in his daydreams was photographed by real-life locals who, almost 70 years later, inhabit the red-brick terraced houses in the Caldmore, Balfrey, Blake and The Butts-Walsall districts which saw a significant amount of South Asian immigration from the late 1950s onwards.

Supported by a National Heritage Lottery Fund grant, Dosanjh has collected oral recollections from first- and second-generation immigrants and transformed them into images that look as if they were made by rural black man Edward Hopper, or the more politically overt Jeff Wall.

Signs of those times have been carefully sought out for these images: Vimto ads, old cars, dodgy Dodgers. “There was actually a market here that sold monkeys, snakes and rat snakes.” The last of these will set you back £12, as the recreated, hand-painted display sign tells us.

“When I do my work, I want people to enter their ancestral space psychologically,” Dosanjh says. Hence, PayDay features South Asian men in an authentic recreation of an early 1970s bar (which clearly didn’t have a color bar to keep the black and brown drinkers out). Then there are the crouching Punjabi men being lectured by their white foreman to the kiln men. Or Sikh friends gathered around the stoves in Walsall on Dayshift. Time and again, what is striking is how Dosanjh finds beauty in images of alienation and humiliation.

The Dosanjh family characters in these works. The rainbow café we see across the street from the Sikh Man in After the Storm is a nod to his father’s project of the same name. Dosanjh Sr. arrived from Punjab in 1967 when he was 14 years old. He was a model for many South Asians who traveled 8,000 miles to work in the Black Country. These single men and boys, many of whom spoke little English, lived in often overcrowded homes but, despite the odds, made a good life for themselves. “By the time my father was 17, he had bought a house and was working in a foundry, then he started a café that had arcade games and a jukebox. Then I came along.”

That was in 1981. Billy, now 45, was born in Smethwick which became the center of his work after he left film school. His 2016 BBC film The Sikhs of Smethwick depicted how Rafi, a Christian of Punjabi descent, married Sonia, a Sikh born and raised in the Black Country – a match that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. In such strange ways, Britain was a land of opportunity, as well as a land whose racism drove some immigrants to despair.

Dosanjh’s humane portrayal of Sikh life suddenly feels objective as a counterpoint to the racist tropes now being deployed by far-right politicians in the wake of Vikrum Dhigoa’s imprisonment this week for stabbing student Henry Novak to death with a ceremonial Sikh knife.

Dosanjh is developing similar projects for Stoke and Nottingham. He also hopes to produce a feature film from his own script about one of the most traumatic periods in recent West Midlands history: the 2005 race riots in the Birmingham boroughs of Lozells and Handsworth. “There was a beauty products store owned by Pakistanis, and a conflict arose between the Caribbean community and young Muslims who, after the events of July 7, felt very confused.” “7/7” refers to the suicide bombings carried out by four British Islamic extremists in London, which resulted in the deaths of 52 people and the injury of more than 770 others. “I thought I needed to make my film here, about this place, because everything is there – different communities living together, empire, youth, and confused identities.”

I have one last question: What are you trying to do with this work? “I never feel more alive than when I’m in the middle of doing something like this,” he says as we leave the gallery. “It really brings a good feeling to everyone. It’s a way to celebrate who you are.”

Paths You Walk: Billy Dosanjh is at New Art Gallery Walsall until 12 July.