Sam Wright’s Pillar to Post begins with a family silence. His great-grandmother, born into Irish Traveller heritage, denounced it upon marriage, and the discovery of that rupture sent Wright looking for the communities she had left behind. Over two years he travelled to eight fairs across the United Kingdom and Ireland, making a contemporary portrait of the resilient and vibrant Traveller and Romani Gypsy communities he encountered.

The fairs are the book’s spine — recurring gathering points where trade, courtship, memory and display converge. Wright photographs the people he met there as participants in a living culture, not as specimens. The sequence he builds with GOST Books gives the pictures room to accumulate into a group portrait. The title itself evokes restless movement, and the book’s organising intelligence lies in how it holds that movement together with the fixity of the fairground: same sites, same rites, new faces each season.

Wright came to the work partly out of shock at the open prejudice he encountered, and the photographs answer the misrepresentative media portrayal he wanted to counter. That impulse could easily have produced advocacy without nuance. What keeps Pillar to Post from that fate is its patience — two years of return visits, 144 pages, a hardback built for looking rather than skimming. The result is a portrait of resilience and vitality that trusts its subjects to speak through posture, dress, and the ordinary theatre of the fair.

For readers of contemporary documentary photography, the book is notable for its bookmaking as much as its subject: a photographer working within a community he has a personal claim on, shaping the material into a sustained sequence rather than a portfolio of singles. It sits alongside recent photobooks that reconsider Britain and Ireland’s marginalised histories from inside.