Alex Webb first travelled to Mexico in the mid-1970s, and he kept going back. La Calle, published by Aperture in 2016, draws on roughly three decades of that commitment, gathering photographs made between 1975 and 2007 in Mexico City, along the United States–Mexico border, and through villages and towns further south.

The pictures are street photographs in the widest sense of the term. Webb works in both black and white and colour, and his frames are dense and layered: gesture, light and the friction of public life arrive in the same instant. The boundaries that normally separate photojournalism, documentary and art are not argued away here so much as left unresolved inside the image, which is part of why the work rewards slow looking rather than quick reading.

What the book proposes is a subject larger than anecdote. Its through-line is la calle itself — the street as an arterial network, as a palimpsest of accumulated history, as an absurdist theatre of the everyday, and as a gauge of social and political change across decades in which Mexico altered considerably. Newly commissioned texts by Mexican and Mexican American writers, among them Guillermo Arriaga, Álvaro Enrigue, Guadalupe Nettel and Valeria Luiselli, run alongside the sequence, adding a second register of voices rather than a single authorial gloss.

For a collector, the volume matters less as a retrospective summary than as a sustained record of one photographer’s attention to one country. Many of Webb’s books are organised around a single journey or theme; this one is organised around a place and thirty years of returning to it. Issued in hardcover in English, with the sequence and the accompanying writing considered as a whole, it sits with the substantial long-form projects in his bibliography.