Photographer David Tunnicliffe presents Humanity, A Celebration, which is currently showing at Milton Keynes Library.
"People are what makes our world special," he says, "Interacting with them is something we should cherish..."
The images are available to view Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm and 9am to 5pm on Saturday.
Robin Dunbar. Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford shares his thoughts on the forthcoming show...
'We humans are surely the most successful of all the mammals. In just a few tens of thousands of years, we have occupied all seven continents and the many scattered islands in between.
'Our capacity to adapt to this wide range of environments has been truly remarkable. And along with that has been the exquisite variety of our cultures, often adapted to local conditions.
'Yet, beneath that extraordinary physical and cultural variety are obvious signals of our unity as a species. And nothing is so characteristic of that as our capacity to face the world with a smile and a laugh.
'You will see smiles and laughter in every society and every culture without exception – two of the many human universals that characterise us despite the wonderful richness and variety of our cultures.
'It is smiles and laughter that, above all, define who we are – our stoic capacity to cope with impoverishment, disease, political upheaval, the petty traumas of everyday life and the worst of environmental disasters, and yet keep smiling through it all.
'David Tunnicliffe has lived and travelled widely in every inhabited continent, photographing the minutiae of everyday life at street corners and roadsides as he has done so.
'These photographs reflect our everyday experiences. We are all here in these photographs – in our fascinating cultural variety, in our coy shyness at being caught on camera, in our bemusement at a casual joke, or thoughtfully focussed on one small part of life’s journey, caught in the mirror of the camera lens.
'What you will see in this exhibition is a small sample of this photographic record, drawn from all around the world. Beautifully photographed, exquisitely presented.
'These are moments in someone’s life caught on camera – a wry smile here, a cheerful greeting there, a pensive moment on the way from some place to another in the course of a day’s work.'
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