From 1873 to 1877, Scottish photographer John Thomson collaborated with journalist Adolphe Smith to document the lives of London’s urban poor.

Their project, Street Life in London, was released in monthly installments and later as a single volume.

Thomson and Smith combined unposed, documentary images of street vendors, beggars and other workers with interviews, essays and reportage, which explored poverty as a sociological problem to be studied and alleviated.

Their project was one of the first examples of socially-concerned documentary photography, and set the tone for concerned photographers of the next century, such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.