Published by Trolley Ltd in 2003, Ghetto is a collaborative photographic study of enclosed and marginalised communities across twelve contemporary locations. The route begins in a refugee camp in Tanzania and ends in a forest in Patagonia, refusing to treat “the ghetto” as a single fixed geography. Its scope encompasses community life, minority experience and the social structures that shape where people live and how they understand their circumstances.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, then editors of COLORS magazine, documented inhabitants in each place through a consistent set of questions: How did you get here? Who is in power? Where do you go to be alone, to make love, or to get your teeth fixed? This repeated framework gives the project a comparative discipline while leaving room for markedly different responses. Many subjects had never previously been photographed; their expressions range from direct, penetrating attention to smiles, refusal, and withdrawal from the camera.

The book’s importance lies in the tension between its systematic method and the irreducibility of the people encountered. Rather than presenting distant populations as anonymous evidence, it places their answers, gestures and everyday needs within the photographic encounter. The result is neither a conventional portrait collection nor a simple sociological survey, but an examination of how power, displacement, intimacy and belonging become visible through images and testimony.

For collectors, Ghetto merits attention as an early Trolley publication and as a substantial English-language hardcover whose form supports sustained reading: the catalogued volume runs to 500 pages. Its two-photographer authorship, international range and carefully repeated questioning make it a distinctive document of collaborative editorial photography at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is a book to study in sequence, where the accumulation of places and voices steadily complicates the title’s singular claim.