Culminating from nearly a decade of visits to the Indian subcontinent by Manuel Rivera-Ortiz1, India. A Celebration of Life has been published by Kehrer. With the forward written by photography critic Christian Caujolle and texts by Michael Benson, Tom Callinan, Alan Griffiths, Enrico Stefanelli and Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, the collection pulls together 169 photographs of the people and places of this incredible nation of polar opposites from Rajasthan to Kolkata, Mumbai to Kutch.

Tom Callinan, Professor of Journalism at the University of Cincinnati, wrote, "The excellence of his work is crafted through a lens of honest engagement and empathetic humility."

Men, women, and children, mostly living on the fringes of Indian society, represent the harsh realities of everyday life in urban slums. But India. A Celebration of Life is more about hope than it is about despair.

• 1. Manuel Rivera-Ortiz is a documentary photographer and writer born relatively poor in Southern Puerto Rico. His work follows the tradition of concerned photography. He photographs in less developed corners of the world recording the dignity of the people who still live disadvantaged in situations of poverty. Rivera-Ortiz's work reflects the horrors of the life he himself witnessed growing up on dirt floors and in corrugated tin shanties. In 2009, he founded The Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation for Documentary Photography & Film. Rivera-Ortiz's photographs are held in museum and corporate collections, including George Eastman Museum in Rochester, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. He lives in Rochester, New York and Zurich.