Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship broke off in 1986, when Jean-Claude Duvalier left the country. What followed was not settlement but a volatile interval, and it is that passage — 1986 to 1988 — which Alex Webb photographed. Under a Grudging Sun, published by Thames & Hudson in 1989, gathers the work in a paperback volume of eighty-five pages.

The subtitle names the territory precisely: the years of Haiti libéré, the “liberated” Haiti that came after Duvalier’s departure. Webb’s photographs attend to what that liberation looked like in practice — the desperate poverty of the period, and the violence that gathered around the November 1987 election, whose collapse ranks among the defining failures of the country’s democratic opening. This is a sustained record of a short and contested stretch of time, not a general survey of Haitian life.

Webb, a member of Magnum Photos since 1976, brought the book out early in a long association with the medium. Its frame is narrow by design: one country, one decisive passage of its recent history, one photographer’s attention held in place. The sequence therefore accumulates as a proposition about a moment rather than as an anthology of places and occasions.

For a collector, the argument for the book rests on that concentration. It is a first-hand photographic record of the Duvalier transition made by someone who was in Haiti while the outcome was still undecided, and issued in 1989 — close enough to the events to retain their uncertainty. Its protagonists are not the figures who made the news but ordinary life under pressure. Eighty-five pages, paperback, in English.