15 Nov Street Life

Photograph by Jo Wallace (https://www.flickr.com/photos/38791739@N02/5597176691/in/52weeksofspnp/)

There are some very powerful new books on the photography of the everyday. Sophie Howard and Stephen McLaren’s Street Photography Now (Thames & Hudson) brings a very old genre bang up to date in what is now a truly global conversation. Equally strong – and democratic in another sense – is The Other Hundred (OneWorld) which is sub-titled 100 Faces, Places, Stories. The compilers selected from 11,000 images shot in 158 countries (including Malaysia) celebrating those will never find themselves on the world’s rich lists or fashionable websites. And then there is India Now: New Visions in Photography (Thames and Hudson), a book that radically sweeps away India’s image clichés of brightly coloured saris and postcards of the Taj Mahal. New observers go to the very roots of their immediate environment: individualist consumerism, the new prosperity, the urban setting, sexuality and, above all, the family.