The Ragged Victorians have been photographed countless times. The challenge is finding a different way to see them. Rather than recreating the familiar black and white imagery of Victorian street photography, I approached this project as if I were creating publicity stills for a film.

‘The Ragged Victorians’ is a living history group recreating the ‘great unwashed’ of Victorian England. This month they visited Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, providing a photographic setting that could have come straight from the nineteenth century.

The re-enactors were happy to work with photographers, often posing or moving into better light, which made it possible to create portraits rather than snapshots.

The challenge wasn’t finding photographs. It was finding a different way of seeing people who have been photographed thousands of times before.

As an example, visit your local photography club on a competition night and there’s a fair chance you’ll see a portrait of one of them.

The Ragged Victorians are a fixture of photography club portraiture. Many images follow the same style: high contrast, black and white, perhaps a sepia tint, with plenty of texture added in post-processing. It works, and it’s easy to see why.

That style has its roots in the work of John Thomson. Between 1876 and 1877, Thomson and the journalist Adolphe Smith produced Street Life in London, a series of photographs documenting labourers, traders, beggars and children living on the margins of Victorian society. You can view a reproduction of the book online and see Thomson's original images, which are stunning.

Those images became part of our collective picture of Victorian Britain, and Thomson created a visual language that photographers still copy nearly 150 years later.

I photographed the Ragged Victorians last year, and on this visit I took along some prints to give to the people in my pictures. Although they were pleased with the gesture, one member of the group looked at the photographs and asked a question that surprised me:

“Why are they in black and white?”

I’d never questioned that assumption. The reason I’d converted the images to monochrome is because that’s what photographs of Victorian poverty are supposed to look like.

But the question made me think about different ways of representing the Victorian period.

I thought about television dramas such as A Thousand Blows. The creators of that series don’t present Victorian England in monochrome. They place nineteenth-century characters into a world of colour, action and atmosphere.

That approach reminds us that the people of the time didn’t live in black and white. They lived in the same light that we do (just with a bit more soot).

That became the starting point for this project.

Rather than trying to imitate Victorian photography, I imagined I was the publicity stills photographer on the set of a contemporary movie about Victorian England. My job was to produce images that suggested a story unfolding between frames.

Colour became part of that approach, as did a cinematic treatment.

I looked for opportunities to photograph women appearing to share a secret, the stern glance of a matriarch, a walking stick that could have been more than a walking stick.

I wanted each photograph to leave people wondering what had just happened, or what was about to happen.

I aimed to capture expressions and gestures to hint at lives where fortunes could change in a moment.

Ultimately, my aim was to move away from a reconstructed time capsule and create a world that felt alive.

The photographs in this project are an attempt to imagine Victorian England as the characters themselves might have experienced it: not as history, but as the present day.