With a keen eye and strong political instincts, photographer Peter Bialobrzeski (born 1961) has made photobooks about new Asian metropolises, wastelands on the outskirts of global cities and a Filipino squatters' camp. His latest project, Informal Arrangements, opens a window onto the interiors of a South African slum. In 2009, Bialobrzeski shot in Kliptown, a poverty-stricken suburb of Soweto less than ten miles away from a glistening new soccer stadium built for the 2010 World Cup. The area's resonance as a symbol of the vast discrepancies of wealth and status that persist in present-day South Africa--representing, as the South African newspaper The Citizen put it, "the dashed hopes and broken dreams of so many"--is unmistakable, and Kliptown has a larger historical significance: it was here, in 1955, that members of the anti-apartheid movement drew up the Freedom Charter, a guiding document for the ANC that today forms a foundation of the South African constitution. The lives of...