Violet Isle, published by Radius Books in 2009, presents Cuba through a deliberately doubled photographic perspective. Its title refers to a little-known name for the island, derived from the rich color of its soil, and the book considers a country that had remained for decades within an economic, political, cultural, and ecological isolation. The result is neither a conventional travel record nor a single-author survey, but a collaborative portrait shaped by two distinct ways of looking.

Alex Webb photographs Cuba’s street life with an acute sensitivity to detail and color. Rebecca Norris Webb turns instead toward the animals she encountered there, assembling a collection described as singular and quixotic. Placed in relation, these bodies of work create a productive tension between the crowded human world and a more oblique, often unexpected natural presence. Their differences are not smoothed into a uniform style; they form the book’s central method, allowing Cuba to appear as layered, elusive, and at times unsettling.

The 70 images are accompanied by an essay from the writer Pico Iyer, adding a literary frame without displacing the photographs’ independent voices. For serious photobook collectors, Violet Isle merits attention as an early collaborative volume in which sequencing and contrast carry as much meaning as individual images. It documents a particular historical moment while also making the act of seeing itself part of the subject: one photographer attends to the public texture of daily life, the other to its strange and vulnerable margins. The English-language paperback runs to 143 pages, with the 2009 Radius Books publication identified by ISBN 9781934435182.