John Comino-James photographed the ordinary Havana neighbourhood of Cayo Hueso over several visits, and the pictures gathered in this, his third book, come from that sustained attention rather than a single trip. Portraits and candid observation build an honest and intimate record of a small, tight-knit community going about its daily life, dealing with the everyday realities that have resulted from decades of political isolation. The title, borrowed in spirit from Graham Greene, insists that a city is, for any of its inhabitants, only a few streets and a few people. This is not the Havana of the tourist.

Comino-James is credited as both photographer and author, and the volume closes with a substantial afterword in which he interweaves his experiences of the area with information on the history of Cuba and of the city of Havana.

The book is a hardback of 156 pages, carrying 121 duotone photographs across pages measuring 22.5 by 24.5 centimetres. The duotone treatment suits the restraint of the subject and gives the sequence a consistency of tone. The collection is organised around continuity of place rather than spectacle: the accumulation of portraits and ordinary moments gradually produces something closer to a portrait of a community than an album of individual pictures. A Spanish subtitle used in cataloguing records Cayo Hueso and the years 2002 to 2005, making the scope of the project explicit as a bounded record of a specific place over a specific period.

For readers of documentary photography, the book’s value lies in that patience. Its subject is a neighbourhood seldom photographed on its own terms, and its method — returning over years, writing as well as looking — places it within a tradition of sustained, place-based photographic books published by Dewi Lewis. It repays slow reading: the afterword gives the images a historical frame that the pictures alone would not supply, and the pairing of text and photograph makes the volume something more considered than a simple gathering of pictures.