‘Family Photography Now’ is a major new publication from Thames & Hudson, bringing together images of domestic life from across the globe. From Magnum photographer Trent Parke’s extraordinary stills of the day-to-day in suburban Australia, to Sian Davey’s hauntingly beautiful series ‘Looking for Alice’, which focuses on her daughter, who was born with Down’s Syndrome, every pictures tells a thousand words about the way we live.

A journey through the modern world, by way of families with same-sex parents, blended families and extended families; Congolese first-time mothers, and Swedish Stay-at-Home-Dads. Featuring 40 image-makers from all walks of life, it includes ‘Still Lifes’, an extraordinary series by Robin Cracknell (as above), whose work is described as “highly personal photographs by a single-parent father, recording unstaged moments in time”; and the work of Daniel W. Coburn who captures “the aftermath of growing up in a troubled evangelical family and grappling with the a loss of faith in the institutions of family and religion”.

A breathtaking compendium of family life as we know it, and as we don’t.

‘Family Photography Now’ is also the title of a simultaneous nine-month/40-week digital project led by The Photographers’ Gallery in London, in collaboration with the book’s publisher and authors Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren.

Using the 40-week human gestation period as a framework, the photographers featured in the book plus other invited guests, will issue a weekly directive inviting participants to respond to and explore a particular social or emotional aspect of family life or construct.

As the book does, the project invites participants to challenge the concept of a normal, or nuclear, family unit.

Visit familyphotographynow.net for more information.