Florida is usually photographed as a promise: beaches, pastel architecture, a horizon that behaves. Alex Webb’s From the Sunshine State: Photographs of Florida, published by The Monacelli Press in 1996, sets itself against that expectation.

Webb made the pictures while moving through the state — Fort Pierce and Daytona Beach, Key Largo, Suwanee and Apalachicola, Disney World among the stops — and the resulting book refuses the postcard. What holds his attention is the social texture of a place that sells one image of itself and lives another: the many cultures and subcultures sharing the peninsula, material that can be read as political, as sociological documentation, and at other moments as ironic or impressionistic record rather than illustration.

A text by Webb accompanies the photographs, describing the physical and emotional course of the journey. It is an unusual presence in a book of this kind, giving the images a companion voice instead of an argument, and it suits a body of work that leaves interpretation open.

Webb had been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979 when this volume appeared. Read beside Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds, Crossings, Amazon and Under a Grudging Sun, it belongs to a long engagement with places under pressure rather than to a single assignment. Collectors drawn to color documentary work from the American South tend to value the Florida book for that reason: it is the state seen by a photographer who is not selling it.

The book runs 128 pages, hardcover, in English, at roughly 23.5 by 28.9 centimeters. For a shelf built around postwar American color photography, it is a modest, durable part of that history.