Considered a pioneering work for its use of photography as social documentation, and one of the most significant and far-reaching photobooks in the medium’s history, Street Life in London was a breakthrough in photographic reporting and observation.

For a fortunate few, late 1870’s Britain was a time of prosperity and wealth. However, a large section of the British population was struggling in squalor and destitution. Between 1876 and 1877 Scottish photographer John Thomson documented the living conditions of the poor. The photographs were intended to help middle class Victorians to gain some understanding of the depth of misery faced by the lower class. As Thomson himself writes: The unquestionable accuracy of this testimony [photographic] will enable us to present true types of the London poor and shield us from the accusation of either underrating or exaggerating individual peculiarities of appearance.

"In mid-Victorian times photographers did not point their cameras at overt social problems. Perhaps this fact in itself reflected something of the period — social conditions of the working classes were not something to be looked at either with the naked eye or the camera." [1]

Perhaps the most striking feature of Street Life is that the images are reproduced photomechanically by the Woodburytype process from the Thompson’s original dry-plate negatives. The resultant prints give a strikingly sharp, permanent, almost three-dimensional toned representation allowing us to experience them today exactly as they were intended when published.

‘Street Life in London’ was issued monthly for a year beginning in February 1877. Each issue contained three Woodburytypes with explanatory biographical text to accompany them. The text was written by Thompson and Adolphe Smith. The 12 monthly parts of were reissued in book form in 1878, and also in a shorter version under the title, Street Incidents was issued in 1881 with 21 of the original 36 Woodburytypes.

“Structurally, Street Life is a combination of street portraiture… and interviews with the subjects. Thus it was the direct predecessor of the journalistic picture stories that would appear in illustrated magazines from that period onward” [2]