The artist Eleanor Macnair is an expert on the subject of Play-Doh. Different colors have different textures, she explains: “The whites are usually very soft; the black’s quite oily.” The children who play with the modeling clay probably haven’t noticed, but Play-Doh is Macnair’s palette: She uses it to recreate her favorite images from the world of documentary photography, then captures her versions on camera.

“I wanted to do something that would have a little humor to it, and maybe a little riskiness,” the photographer Mike Mandel says. His new book, “People in Cars” out next month, does just that: It’s a collection of snapshots he took in 1970s California as a 19-year-old kid. “I grew up in Los Angeles and all of my experience of being in L.A. was about going from one place to the other by car,” he recalls.

"There’s an old French expression: The nearer the gallows, the clearer the truth,” says the documentary photographer Joel Sternfeld. “And my truth began with Walker Evans.” The iconic photographer of the Great Depression was a key inspiration on Sternfeld’s own influential 1987 photography book “American Prospects,” images from which go on display at London’s Beetles+Huxley gallery this week, alongside pictures that have never been shown before.

Knorr was particularly interested in the exclusion of women, who might be invited into the clubs as guests, but did not have access to every room. “This was the early ’80s and Thatcher was in power, yet she was not allowed to be a full member,” says the photographer.