Anatomy of a Picture

The project began not with a camera but with conversations. Events held at Smethwick Heritage Centre and the Red Cow pub brought together old faces and new — community members from the South Asian diaspora who settled in the Black Country during the 1960s. Balbir, the local poet laureate, sang his 1960s-written songs, transporting the gathering to the soul of the area. These sessions were followed by community events at Caldmore Community Garden in Walsall, where participants shared memories, photographs, and objects from their families' first years in England. The project also presented at Walsall College, building a partnership that would bring eighteen student crew members into the production itself — embedding the next generation in the act of recovering the last.

"The most political thing you can do is tell a story."

The three tableau subjects emerged from a decade of accumulated research. Billy Dosanjh grew up in West Bromwich in the 1980s and 90s, absorbing stories from his parents' generation — some first-hand, some second-hand, some community gossip — about the epic upheaval of emigrating from India to the Black Country in the 1960s. The Paths You Walk tableaux are set against the precise historical backdrop of the 1964 general election — a campaign inflamed by the open racism of Peter Griffiths in the Smethwick constituency — and the years immediately before and after it. Consulting historians, local archive collections held at Walsall Library, and the memories gathered through community events, a script was developed for three scenes: The Hidden Hand (Butts Road, 1964), Ghosts in the Cane (a lodging house near Bartons Foundry, 1958), and Forbidden Embrace (a Butts Road lock-up, 1965).

Art Director Adam Tomlinson — whose credits include This Is England and Dead Man's Shoes, films that share Paths You Walk's commitment to a hyper-real evocation of working-class life — led the production design process. Each tableau required period-accurate set construction: the sodium street lighting of a 1964 Walsall night, the cramped interior of a 1958 workers' lodging house, the intimacy of a lock-up garage illuminated by a single bare bulb. Eighteen Walsall College students were recruited across four departments — art and set construction, costume and wardrobe, hair and makeup, and production support — bringing institutional knowledge and lived community connection into the process. Producer Deborah Aston (Small Axe, Boiling Point) coordinated a production that treated each element of costume, prop, and lighting as a narrative argument, not mere decoration.

"Donkey jackets with a subtle liquid-gold sheen on the shoulders — as if the foundry metal had not quite washed off."

Site preparation and filming took place in January 2026 in Walsall. Each tableau was shot across multiple sessions, building the composite image from hundreds of individual frames — a filmic process in which lighting conditions, cast positions, costume states, and magical-realist practical effects were each captured separately and assembled in post-production. The cast of The Hidden Hand alone included twelve distinct character types, each with documented wardrobe specifications, SFX requirements, and magic-realist details: the golden flakes dissolving from foundry workers' jackets, the preternaturally white nurse's apron, the cracked pavement running with the red water of Partition, the saffron dust in the folds of the Seeker's wrinkled suit.

"The pavement beneath the observers is cracked and bubbling with saturated red water — the bleeding earth of Partition."

Post-production involved assembling hundreds of source frames into single, unified large-format images — a process that echoes the method of Dayshift (2019), which was composed from over 800 individual source files. The resulting masters were printed at exhibition scale for installation at The New Art Gallery Walsall. Each print is also published as a deep-zoom digital archive entry, accessible from QR codes displayed beside the physical works in the gallery. Visitors can study every surface at print resolution — the ingrained soot, the Phulkari quilt pattern, the chrome police torch's spectral beam — on their own device, in their own time.

"These settings form an important aspect of my films and photographs — not so much as backdrops, but as actual characters in the work."