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

Paths You Take is a show that finds beauty in images of alienation as Billy Dosanjh turns his lens on race, identity, empire – and the men who kept the furnaces glowing

It was bitter in Walsall that winter of 1962-3 when snow turned the Black Country white. In After the Storm, Billy Dosanjh’s epic photographic reconstruction of one especially chilly night back then, an elderly Sikh man, recently arrived from the Punjab, stands under an old carriage lamp. He is, the shot suggests, 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,” says Dosanjh as we stroll around Paths You Walk, his gripping exhibition of photographs, films and installations at the New Art Gallery Walsall. At the back of the image, three furnace smoke stacks rise up in ghostly fashion, almost like the three crosses on Calvary have been relocated to Mordor.