Brooklyn, the City Within begins as a homecoming. Alex Webb had spent four decades photographing other people’s streets; this book, published by Aperture in 2019, turns his attention to the borough where he lives, and sets his pictures alongside a second, quite different body of work by Rebecca Norris Webb. The result is less a survey of Brooklyn than a conversation about whether a place can be seen twice at once.

Webb’s contribution moves across the borough’s full breadth, through neighbourhoods whose populations have been repeatedly remade by migration. The dense, layered colour he is known for suits a subject that is itself dense and layered: one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth, and one that has long served as a first address for families arriving in the United States.

Rebecca Norris Webb works at a different scale and a different tempo. She photographed what she calls “the city within the city within the city” — the green heart of Brooklyn, in the Botanic Garden, Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park. These are the places where residents of every background cross paths and, often, look for quiet. Placed beside his street scenes, her photographs shift the book’s register from the social toward the contemplative without ever leaving the same borough.

Held together, the two sequences take up immigration, identity and home as lived experience rather than as argument. Sean Corcoran is credited among the contributors; the volume runs to 208 pages in a hardcover format of roughly 29 by 22 centimetres, a size that allows both photographers’ work to sit at full strength.

For a collector, the appeal lies in that structure. Two-photographer books often amount to portfolios bound together under one cover; this one is a genuine exchange, in which a single place is described in two incompatible but complementary visual languages. It also sits comfortably within Aperture’s documentary list — serious work about American cities, made by photographers who have spent years on the ground rather than months. Brooklyn, the City Within appeared on at least one year-end photobook selection in 2019, a modest signal but a fair one.