Josh Edgoose’s debut monograph, Brilliant Parade, is a celebration of the character and energy of London’s streets through the serendipitous interactions that happen every day and usually go unnoticed. Over five years, Edgoose observed and photographed the encounters and moods of the city, capturing its colourful, ever-changing essence. Rather than a survey of landmarks, the book attends to what usually passes unremarked: small collisions, exchanges and moods that give a crowded street its temper.

Edgoose works in colour, and his instinct is comic and tender at once, letting bold hues, odd gestures and passing expressions lock together into scenes that feel found rather than staged. He strove to organise chaotic scenes in order to discover the disposition of a city that contains everything in its vast magnitude, taking different pieces of the metropolis and seamlessly putting them together. The photographs are candid in method but composed in effect, and the cumulative rhythm says as much about how a city moves as about any single frame.

Setanta Books issues the collection in hardback at 265 by 238 mm, a landscape format that gives the horizontal traffic of street photography room to breathe, with a tipped-in image on the cover. The book runs to 92 pages and 51 pictures. In Brilliant Parade, bold colours, gestures, notes of humour and emotion intertwine to build a portrait of London’s iconic streets, giving a feel for the rhythm of a fast-moving city that is the grandiose stage for a diverse cast of characters who inadvertently fill the frame.

Josh Edgoose is a London-based photographer with an interest in colour and coincidence. He has been building his skills over the last decade and loves photographing and discovering the UK. His work has been selected for exhibitions both in the UK and internationally, and has been featured in publications including It’s Nice That, The Guardian and the Economist.