In 1996, a peace accord between Guatemala’s government and the URNG guerrillas closed thirty-six years of civil war. Almost 150,000 people had been killed and some 50,000 remained missing, the great majority of them Maya, targeted from both sides of the conflict. Thomas Hoepker, a Magnum photographer, had been travelling to Guatemala since 1991, and Return of the Maya, published by Dewi Lewis in 1998, is the book that came out of those repeated visits.

Hoepker’s subject is not the war as such but what follows it: the Maya’s recovery of a culture and a history that had been suppressed, and the long, unresolved work of searching the killing fields for the dead. Catholic and Mayan rituals, central to that recovery, recur throughout the sequence, and the photographs are arranged to hold both mourning and renewal in view. Readers should expect images that unsettle as readily as they compel; the book does not soften what it records.

The photographs are Hoepker’s alone, and the publisher credits him as the book’s photographer. The volume runs to 144 pages in hardback, measuring roughly 28.6 by 22.3 centimetres, a scale that gives the sequencing room to work without turning the book into a monument.

For a collector, the case rests on the conjunction of photographer, place and moment. Hoepker’s Guatemalan work is not among his most widely circulated bodies of pictures, and the subject — a postwar society reassembling itself around ritual and memory — gives the book a documentary weight that has not faded with the headlines. It belongs with the photography of Central America’s conflicted decades, and with the wider question of how a photographer can witness recovery rather than only destruction.