The novelist Tom Wolfe used the expression ‘the hive’ to refer to the frenetic social life of New York City, but the metaphor of the beehive works equally well for any great human agglomeration. The twenty-first century has seen the long history of rural dominance come definitively to an end – for the first time in 200,000 years of Homo sapiens’ existence, more people live in urban centres than outside them. The ever-larger urban organisms we develop are not only passive hives of day-to-day living but active hives of learning, producing and thinking. Photographers, too, are urbanites, delighting in the pictorial possibilities offered by the unceasing ebb and flow of crowds.

The poet John Donne famously said, ‘No man is an island’. We are genetically social animals, seeking friends, mates and partners of all types to share interests. But not all is smooth in our social lives. Misunderstandings, conflicts of interest, the pressure to conform versus the desire to stand out from the crowd; we crave to be in fashion but recoil when we are told we are sheep blindly following popular crazes. Yet the essential human condition is to be alone – as we were when we came into the world and will be when we go out of it. But while we live, we live collectively. Photographs both show our interdependence and reinforce it.

Whether on the ground, across the sea or through the air, twenty-first-century civilisation moves itself – its people, its material goods, its raw resources, its ideas and even its symbols – at speeds unimaginable to humans just one hundred years ago. A chief lubricant, money, now flows through ‘pipelines’ at the speed of light, as does that other one – oil. Automobiles have multiplied human mobility fifty-fold. Planes pick us up on one continent and put us down on another the same day. Photographers revel in the possibilities, working in every conceivable industry to unveil the complexities of our planetary civilisation’s intricate moving parts.

Getting things done often means convincing others of a course of action. We educate and we train; we explain and we argue; we encourage and we threaten. Persuasion can be subtle or heavy-handed. Sometimes it means getting people to do things that are not necessarily in their interest, but are presented to them in such a way that they appear to be. Advertising and propaganda, marketing and promotion … these are commercial arts that have risen to exceptional levels of sophistication in modern societies, often to the extent that large populations do not realise they are being directed. Photographers lift the lid on these manipulations, allowing us to glimpse the subtle strategies others use to have us do their bidding.

At a basic level of abstraction, a civilisation can be likened to a complex machine; parts are constantly repaired or replaced; it is protective of itself both from outsiders and internal existential threats. Control, often subtly disguised under the banner of safety or innovation, has grown to be inevitable in our modern globalised existence. It is expressed on a grand scale in the form of governing bodies and armies who wield war and diplomacy, or in the form of the law, corporations and educational institutions. It is expressed more concretely in the places where authority is executed in daily life, such as police stations, prisons, courts, schools, boardrooms, power stations and laboratories. Photographers have found varied and ingenious ways to frame these complex realities, which are often hidden from public view

Collective troubles, breaks in the natural order, obstructions of justice, violations of human rights, displacement of people, armed conflict, the slow or abrupt death of industries – photographers have been diligently telling tales of rupture throughout the turbulent early years of our twenty-first century. Their provocative works, sometimes taken at great personal risk or staged meticulously to bring attention to emerging crises, address a variety of subjects, including environmental degradation, border conflict and management, war and violence, mass migration, and the failures of political and ideological systems. They force us to confront our civilisation’s blind spots and its failures, with images varying from the dispassionately abstract to the emotionally engaging.

Escape is sometimes used as a term to describe breaking free from some form of physical or emotional confinement, or generally fleeing any dire or merely disagreeable situation. For people fleeing war and conflict, escape has literal meaning. For the privileged inhabitants of the world, the term has a positive connotation: ‘getting away from it all’. We search for diversion, relaxation and rest, or novelty, adventure and excitement. A pleasure business has blossomed, offering a spectacular array of ‘products’ to its avid consumers around the globe while providing rich inspiration for photographers as they pull back the curtain on this costly industry.

‘What’s next?’ We ask ourselves this daily. Driverless cars are here and planes are on the near horizon, while robots already mow our lawns and operate on our bodies – often doing a more reliable job than our fellow humans. Once the stuff of sci-fi fantasy, new technologies now move in short order from laboratories to consumer shelves. We expect innovation and change in every area of our lives. But who dares to predict what our world, its cities and machines, will look like in 2100? And what will we look like? What is clear is that this brave new world is increasingly a collective endeavour. Photographers look for signs of this not-so-distant world; they locate the seeds being sown and the plant forms sprouting everywhere.