Books: Hope Photographs

Hope, the flyleaf tells us, is `with us as an instinct, a feeling, an impulse, as an insistent human reflex in the face of negativism and despair'. Hope Photographs collates 107 different incarnations, forms and images of hope from different times, from all around the world: we have young men attempting to become airborne in Rouzat in 1910; fiery jets from young stars, as seen from Arizona; an octogenarian clutching a paper cone of yellow flowers, visiting his friend in hospital in Berlin; Portuguese immigrants waltzing in the street in Shantytown; a man building himself a small pyramid in Egypt; Irish punks looking out to sea in Galway; and Nicholas Nixon's `Clementine, Cambridge, 1992', right.

Hope Photographs ed Alice Rose George and Lee Marks, Thames and Hudson, pounds 18.95