Alex Webb’s Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds: Photographs from the Tropics was published by Thames & Hudson in 1986 as a 91-page hardcover. Its subtitle is precise rather than atmospheric: these are photographs made in the tropics, across Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Barbados, India, Zaire, Ivory Coast, Uganda and Trinidad.

Webb made the work over roughly a decade, much of it while travelling on photojournalistic assignments, and the book accumulates rather than argues. No single crisis or country organises it. What holds the sequence together is a way of seeing: saturated colour, congested frames, figures caught at the moment when a scene’s logic begins to slip.

The book’s own framing sets Webb beside a literary tradition of astonished, unsettled writing about the tropics — Conrad, Greene, Naipaul, Fuentes — and that comparison is useful less as praise than as a description of tone. Beauty and desperation share the same frame; exuberance and incipient violence are not parcelled out into separate pictures.

What makes the volume consequential is its position between two practices. Webb was working out of the documentary habits of photojournalism while using colour photography at a moment when it was still being argued over as an artistic medium. The result is neither reportage with better film stock nor art photography with the politics removed. The pictures stay unresolved on purpose.

For a collector, the interest is historical rather than speculative. This is a book from the mid-1980s, and the sequence can be read as a sustained study of how a place is registered rather than summarised. Its reproductions have been described as finely printed. It rewards attention to the ordering of pages, not only to individual images.