This, at least, is how Martin Parr views the photographs he made in the 1970s as a student at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University) and, after three years of training, as a recent graduate. He looks back at them “with affection,” he said. “It helps me remember the times and places I lived through.” However, because he’s become so well-known, they are more than images from a curious 20-year-old. Displayed in “Martin Parr: Return to Manchester” at the Manchester Art Gallery, these early projects, mostly in black and white, speak to both the transformation of the northern English city and the evolution of the photographer who took them.

“Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” an ode to uncertainty. “Without noticing that you have traversed a great distance, the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange, at least awkward or uncomfortable.”

The series Mr. Parr made in Prestwich Mental Hospital in 1972 relates since it stands as an outlier, even though he saw it as the moment when his photography “really took off.” The images of the patients, both playful and perturbed, are endearing thanks to the rapport he established with them to better understand those often shunted to the margins.