Between the late 1980s and the middle of the 1990s, Barry Lewis did what plenty of people only talk about doing: he left the London winter behind and went to Miami. He went at Christmas, he went repeatedly, and he took his camera. *Miami Beach 1988–1995* collects what those returns produced, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2019, with an introduction by Bill Hayes.

The South Beach in these photographs is not a resort seen from a safe distance. Lewis photographed the people who made up the community: Cubans who had arrived in the years after the 1980 Mariel exodus, Jewish retirees from New York, fashionistas, drag queens and the gay men who had claimed Ocean Drive for themselves. The district was then emerging from a long stretch of crime, drug dealing and violence, and the pictures register that emergence without tidying it up — a place being repossessed by the people living in it, at street level, in colour.

Anyone who knows South Beach only in its later, glossier form will find something else here: a neighbourhood in the middle of remaking itself, photographed by someone who kept coming back. That holiday rhythm matters. These are not the impressions of a reporter sent down on assignment but the accumulated observations of a photographer who knew the season, the regulars and the light, and who had time to wait.

Hoxton Mini Press issued the book in hardcover in 2019. For collectors, its interest lies in the timing. Lewis’s visits bracket the years in which South Beach stopped being one thing and started becoming another; the sequence holds both states in view and preserves a cast of residents and regulars who have since scattered. It is documentary photography with a warm, unruly feel for character, more attentive to the people in front of the lens than to the reputation the place would later acquire.