This time round, it's Yemen which is the focus for Tim's lens appropriately enough the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East and Asia and one of the places which laid the foundations of Britain's Muslim community. In his new book Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh Yemen and British Yemenis, he travels from Bradford to capture scenes in modern Yemen, a country which many families have left behind to start new lives here in Britain in, for instance, the Merchant Navy or the steel industry. He feels that these images whether taken in the Middle East or in West Yorkshire can help make connections: "One thing is that there's so much stuff written and talked about in the media and all over the place about places like Bradford and immigration and multiculturalthis and multiethnicthat. But, take the Pakistani community, for example. There's very little understanding outside that community itself about why they came, how they came, where they came from and all that background story. Hopefully it's of value for the wider community as well because it puts those communities in context and is wasn't just that they magically turned up here one year because there were jobs going in textiles."
Shopping for a wedding dress in Sana'a
Again, says Tim, it's all about making those links between communities: "It's about the history of the British Empire and the history of the First World War and the Second World War, the Partition of India and Pakistan and all those trade and military links that go back centuries which are really the reason why there are people from Kashmir here. Seventy five percent of Pakistanis in the UK are from an area of southern Kashmir called Mirpur and there are very good reasons for that.
Having worked on commissions for publications such as the Guardian, Independent, Observer and the Times, he's certainly put in the legwork or should that be the lenswork? but he now finds himself with more chances to work to his own brief on things like Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh. He says this comes as a bit of a relief: "When you're in your twenties and thirties, for example, when I worked for a news agency, it was quite exciting getting up and not knowing where you were going to be that day and dashing about and doing pictures on very tight deadlines that would be in the 'paper the next day. But even back at the start, for Tim it was all about telling stories through the camera lens: "When I was in Newport I did a project on the docklands area where I lived a very cosmopolitan place near the docks where people had come from all over the world to South Wales. That's what interested me about Bradford, in a way."Even with Coal, Frankincense and Myrrh hot off the presses, Tim Smith's already got his eye on the future it's next stop the West Indies! It's a logical choice for him as he spent some of his childhood there while his father worked for the British government overseas: "The West Indies is this place I have a personal link to, so I'd like to go back and perhaps take some pictures there."
