Tom Hicks’s Black Country Type series began in 2017, when he started photographing striking sights while out cycling in the West Midlands. Since then, the artist, writer and curator has taken hundreds of photographs of brightly coloured buildings and unusual signs, now collected in a book. “It’s a free-form exploration of a region that people don’t know much about,” he says. One of the trickiest aspects of the project is his self-imposed rule about using the sun as natural lighting. “If the sun’s out, I get my bike out. For me, the sunshine lights up the buildings: it illuminates all the textures, revealing things you wouldn’t see on a gloomy day.”
