In 1969 Homer Sykes was twenty years old and crossing the United States by Greyhound bus, photographing as he went. He travelled again in 1971; on the two later trips, in 1999 and 2001, he also kept a written journal. On the Road Again gathers all four journeys — seventy-three duotone photographs across 120 pages — in a paperback published by Art Books International.

The trips are printed as one continuous movement rather than four separate portfolios. A bus window, a depot, a street corner, a hire car pulled over at the edge of a town: the situations recur, but the decades do not. Placed together, the early and late pictures turn the book into an argument about looking — how a young British photographer saw America at the end of the 1960s, and what he found there thirty years later with a career behind him. The journal passages from the later journeys interrupt the sequence with a second, more explicit voice.

Sykes is known chiefly as a documentarian of British life: customs, suburbs, and the ways people gather in public. The American material applies the same instinct away from home ground, and it stands apart in his bibliography for that reason. The book is also a record of a subject — the American road — handled here by someone looking in from outside the tradition rather than working within it.

For collectors of documentary photography, the interest lies in that pairing of youthful and mature work inside a single volume, in a sequence that sets the two against each other, and in the duotone printing of the images. It is a considered book rather than a slight one, and it shows a photographer’s practice over time instead of a single episode of it.