“I think it takes a certain type of person to be a drummer,” said Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s former drummer, who is now with the supergroup Them Crooked Vultures. “It’s your responsibility to make sure this thing gets off the ground, but don’t expect any thanks.”

Drummers, he said, are like the goalkeepers of a band and are “usually the last ones to get credit” for their contributions. But in Deirdre O’Callaghan’s book “The Drum Thing,” which Prestel published in November, drummers, including Grohl, are front and center. Featuring portraits of and interviews with nearly 100 percussionists working across the musical spectrum, from rock to jazz to hip-hop, the book is a who’s who of the men and women who keep the beat.

“A lot of these drummers are behind some of the most important music of the last 60-odd years,” Ms. O’Callaghan said.

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She developed a love of music growing up in Cork, Ireland, in a house of eclectic tastes. Her sister blasted Rachmaninoff on a tape deck in their shared bedroom while her father favored radio stations that played Irish rebel and folk songs. Ms. O’Callaghan started photographing musicians at Dazed & Confused magazine in London and always found herself drawn to the rhythm section, whose performance she found “almost like a dance.”

“When you choose to be a drummer, you’re the one who gets there 20 minutes early to set up your kit, and you’re the one who leaves last as well,” she said. “You really have to be dedicated.”

Her previous long-term photography projects were also about communities. For her first book, “Hide That Can,” she spent four years photographing the men of Arlington House, a hostel in the Camden area of London. After that, she spent five years photographing residents of the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

In 2011, over dinner with an old friend, Sarah Lowe, and her husband, Jim Sclavunos, the drummer for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, she finally set her sights on drummers and started compiling a list of around two dozen she dreamed of photographing. Over the next year, Ms. O’Callaghan slowly made her way through it, arranging portrait sessions for what she then assumed would become a magazine feature. When she met the celebrated jazz drummer Roy Haynes at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London, however, she knew she needed to broaden her scope.

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“He was telling so many fantastic stories, I decided then and there I had to start recording and interviewing people,” she said. “That added a whole new dimension to the project.”

She started out photographing the drummers at their kits wherever they agreed to meet her. But as she realized her project was becoming a book, she grew determined to meet the musicians, as often as possible, at their homes, where she figured the idiosyncratic environments would provide further insights into their personalities.

From there, her photos became more diverse. She started photographing objects — Kenny Wollesen’s turntable, for instance, and Dave Lombardo’s metronome — that encapsulated her subjects’ aesthetics. In her portraits, she sometimes left the drums behind altogether. Her photo of the jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette, for instance, shows him playing the piano. Jim Black is pictured strumming a guitar. In her photo of Bryan Devendorf of the National, he stands open-armed on the beach, no instrument in sight.

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Ms. O’Callaghan’s project also came to incorporate landscapes. When she interviewed Jack White at Third Man Records in Nashville, he mentioned that he loved hearing the sound of the train passing by the building, a “timeless thing,” he told her, that “you almost think shouldn’t exist anymore.” When Ms. O’Callaghan visited the city again a few years later, she took a photo of the train, which now appears in the book.

“You’re still capturing a real sense of what that person is about,” she said. “It gives a much fuller story.”

Although the people in her book live all over the world and often inhabit different musical worlds, Ms. O’Callaghan said they could seem part of one big tribe, in which certain bands and their drummers are words in a shared language. Mr. White, Steven Drozd, Julie Edwards and Jody Stephens all name John Bonham, Led Zeppelin’s drummer, as an influence, for instance.

Still, the interviews in the book speak to a variety of musical philosophies. “Anybody has the capacity to be a great drummer,” Patrick Carney of the Black Keys said, so long as they play with the right people. But the R&B drummer James Gadson thinks the job requires a special sort of personal alchemy.

“People used to say — and it’s true — either you got it, or you don’t,” Gadson said. “There’s a rhythm, and what comes from that is an aura. I can’t say any more than that.”

Follow @D_O_Callaghan, @teicherj and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Deirdre O’Callaghan is also on Instagram. You can also find Lens on Facebook and Instagram.