So Chris Clunn Contact has travelled the capital, photographing the shops, Contact ?N=D their staff and their customers. Contact The results can be seen from Monday in an exhibition at the Museum of London. Often their interiors have changed little in more than 50 years, and feature magnificent tiling, rudimentary wooden benches, Contact and ?N=D marble-topped tables About time, then, that these ?N=D gems were recorded. London's an oddly old-fashioned place. Take pie and mash shops: these ?N=D undiluted manifestations Contact of Victorian working-class life would be ?N=D easy meat to the burger chains in the Home Counties.

Yet in east and south- east London several survive and thrive, supplying costermongers and marketgoers with wedges of mash, bowlfuls of stewed eels, ladles of parsley liquor, and meat pies fresh from the oven. Platteland at RFH Galleries, South Bank SE1 (071-928 8800); book is published by Quartet (£25). This is their story - and it's particularly tragic: poverty-stricken, rejected and downgraded, these are South Africans with no identity at all. And it's clear from the fraught and often ravaged faces that stare out from these powerful, virtually surreal portraits, that despite the political privilege apartheid has bestowed on the white population, many whites have slipped through the net. Platteland, a new exhibition and book, is the result of Ballen's two-year journey across South Africa's Platteland (the word used to refer to the predominantly barren South African countryside), to uncover the plight of the ignored white minority. It's a new slant, pure documentary and - in the grand tradition of Walker Evans in America and August Sander in Germany - an incisive use of portraiture to reflect times of great change. The power, here, comes not from alienation, but by exposing what is there for the taking: the juxtaposition of slum conditions, white people and South Africa.

But the difference is this: while Avedon's pictures, currently gracing the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, derive their power from the juxtaposition of "ordinary" people against the exact same plain, empty white background as the celebrities he photographs, Ballen's subjects sit starkly in the discomfort of their own ramshackle homes. It turns out that the cost of the jacket is about the same as a one-way flight from Moscow to London.Berghaus Gemini Chimera, £349.95 Stockist inquiries 0191 415 0200.Simon Calder. Roger Ballen's black-and-white portraits of the poverty-stricken, down- trodden whites of South Africa bear a striking resemblance to the portraits of southern and western American drifters economically photographed against stark white canvases by the fashionable New York snapper Richard Avedon. My beastly old coat has no such characteristics, but then it cost nowhere near £350. A normal day involves veering from the very cold to the suffocatingly hot. Most interiors are overheated to a ludicrous extent, yet you remain blissfully unaware of the reverse osmosis of perspiration. The term "wind-chill factor" takes on a whole new meaning in a Russian winter.