Alex Webb photographed Istanbul for the first time in 1998 and kept returning. The book that came out of those years, published by Aperture in 2007 as Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names, is not a survey of monuments or a travelogue. Webb works in dense, layered colour, filling the frame with several simultaneous events: a gesture in the foreground, a poster behind it, a body passing at the edge. His Istanbul is a city where the early-morning call to prayer rises over minarets and pigeons, and where, one block away, cash machines glow and jeans carry designer labels. Old fabric and new commerce share the same square metre.

That crowding is the argument. Webb has said he has spent some thirty years drawn to borders — places where cultures meet, sometimes easily, sometimes roughly — and Istanbul, straddling Europe and Asia, hands him the subject in its most literal form. The photographs register a culture in transition without tidying it up.

The book carries an essay by Orhan Pamuk. The pairing matters: a novelist whose work is inseparable from the city, and a photographer who approaches it as an outsider’s puzzle. Text and pictures do different jobs, and the volume is stronger for not collapsing the two into one voice.

Aperture issued the work as a large hardcover — roughly 30 by 26 centimetres, with about 135 pages — so the pictures keep the scale of the street. For a collector, the interest lies in the conjunction: Webb’s sustained engagement with a single city, worked out over several years of return visits, and a Pamuk text that speaks from within the city’s own literary memory. Its subject, a border that is also a home, has lost none of its pressure.