Millennium Generation

Today's children are the product of the old era, but they also represent the hopes for the new millennium. This is their story. Photographer Robin Laurance has travelled through the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia to record the way young people from completely different cultures are responding to the challenge of growing up as "the millennium generation". His probing photographs - ranging from Masai teenagers on the threshold of manhood to a young Buddhist monk in Japan, from the dancers of London's Royal Ballet School to the cadets of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis - remind us not only of the characteristics that unite all humans as they go from birth to adulthood but also of the spectacular and rich diversity of the peoples of the planet. There is no attempt to disguise the problems of poverty or injustice, whether in villages far from paradise or in unforgiving city streets, but there is also much that is happy, determined, energetic, tranquil, humorous and joyful about the kaleidoscopic experience.