Aperture issued The Suffering of Light in 2011 as a hardcover of unusual heft — roughly 31 by 33 centimetres, a couple of hundred pages — the sort of book that asks for a table rather than a lap. Its subtitle states the terms plainly: thirty years of photographs by Alex Webb.

Those years run from 1979 to 2009. Webb worked repeatedly in Haiti and along the Mexican border, and across the Caribbean more broadly, in places where saturated colour and layered incident arrive together. His frames are crowded in the productive sense: several planes of activity, figures entering and leaving, shadows doing structural work. Genre is not the organising principle. Street photography, photojournalism and fine-art practice bleed into one another across the sequence, and the sequence itself reads as a chronology rather than a thematic selection.

This was the first comprehensive monograph to chart Webb’s career, drawn from a catalogue that had until then been seen mostly in fragments. It gathers key images alongside photographs that had not previously been published, and it carries an essay by Geoff Dyer — a writer whose own resistance to fixed categories suits a photographer who has never settled into one. Webb has been described as a pioneer of American colour photography from the 1970s onward; a thirty-year survey is where that claim can be inspected page by page rather than simply asserted.

For a collector, the case rests on completeness rather than scarcity. A large-format Aperture monograph that consolidates three decades of a photographer’s colour work, ordered into a single span, with signature pictures and unpublished ones in the same volume, and with an essay by a writer of Geoff Dyer’s standing, is a reference object — the kind of book other books about this period are measured against, and consulted rather than shelved.