Alex Webb’s *Amazon: From the Floodplains to the Clouds*, published by The Monacelli Press in 1997, tracks one of the longest rivers in the world from its mouth to its source: the Brazilian delta, then Colombia, and finally the ponds and streams below Mount Mismi in Peru. The structure is not decorative. The river supplies the book’s direction, and the photographs read as stages of a single passage rather than as unrelated assignments gathered between covers.

Webb gives as much weight to people as to terrain. In the lowlands he finds backwater ports and river settlements that have spread into towns and cities, along with festivity, costume and parade. Indigenous traditions and European influence occupy the same ground, sometimes within a single frame. The Peruvian highlands change the register entirely: bare rock, severe weather, and a political conflict that runs through daily life. Little here is offered as exotic spectacle; the work proceeds as documentation, alert to what living beside the water actually asks of people.

The book is a 144-page hardcover, generous in format and evidently edited so that the passage holds as one continuous reading. That ambition separates it from Webb’s other volumes of the period, which more often circle a single country or city. His subject here is a whole course of water and the dissimilar worlds it links.

For a collector, the case for the volume is editorial rather than speculative. It is a book-length documentary essay whose meaning depends on sequence and on the printed page; individual pictures take force from placement, and the movement from floodplain to cloud, from humid delta to cold highland source, carries the book’s thinking. Readers drawn to the documentary photobook’s capacity for sustained structure, and to Webb’s extended engagement with this region, will find that capacity exercised in full.