For two years, Polly Braden photographed a small number of children and adults supported by MacIntyre, a British charity that provides learning, support, education and care to more than 1,500 children, young people and adults with learning disabilities, complex needs and autism, and their families, across England and Wales. The resulting book, published by Dewi Lewis in 2016, attends to everyday moments, achievements and milestones: finding employment, using public transport, gaining a measure of independence, graduating from high school, getting married. The publisher described the context in 2016 as substantial: there were around 1.5 million people in the UK with a learning disability and 700,000 with autism. The subject is complex, but the aim is simple.

Braden is known for photographs of intimate communication between people, and of gestures that hint at something without explaining it; her work explores the relationship between everyday life, work, leisure and economics. Here that attentiveness serves a subject often reduced to statistics or sentiment. An interview with David Campany and an afterword by Sophie Howarth accompany the sequence. Andrew Solomon, author of Far From The Tree, writes of these intimate photos that Braden captures the inner lives of people with differences and disabilities, seeing their dignity and sometime pathos, their humor and disappointment, their optimism and their ability to love, documenting their intense individuality. This is not a portrait of disability, he writes, but a series of portraits of people with disabilities.

The book has a declared purpose beyond the shelf: to engage decision-makers and the wider public so that people with a learning disability receive the same opportunities as anyone else. The publisher announced that profits from the book would be donated to MacIntyre, whose fiftieth anniversary fell in 2016.

The volume is a clothbound hardback of 180 pages with approximately 150 images, measuring 315mm x 230mm. Braden’s book China Between was published by Dewi Lewis in 2010, and her work has appeared in several other publications. In recent years she has collaborated with journalists to produce extended photo-essays in the UK, the Middle East, Morocco, Kenya and China, and she has worked with The Guardian, The Saturday Telegraph Magazine, Portfolio, ICON, Photoworks and Frieze. A previous winner of both the Jerwood Photography Prize and The Guardian Young Photographer of the Year award, she has exhibited internationally, including in the UK, Germany and the United States.