How Alex Webb Sees in Color

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How Alex Webb Sees in Color

In 1975, I reached a kind of dead end in my photography. I had been photographing in black and white, then my chosen medium, taking pictures of the American social landscape in New England and around New York—desolate parking lots inhabited by elusive human figures, lost-looking children strapped in car seats, and dogs slouching by on the street. The photographs were a little alienated, sometimes ironic, occasionally amusing, perhaps a bit surreal, and emotionally detached. Somehow I sensed that the work wasn’t taking me anywhere new. I seemed to be exploring territory that other photographers—such as Lee Friedlander and Charles Harbutt—had already discovered. I happened to pick up Graham Greene’s novel, The Comedians, a work set in the turbulent world of Papa Doc’s Haiti, and read about a world that fascinated and scared me. Within months, I was on a plane to Port-au-Prince.

That first three-week trip to Haiti transformed me—both as a photographer and as a human being. I photographed a kind of world I had never experienced before, a world of emotional vibrancy and intensity: raw, disjointed, often tragic. I began to explore other places—in the Caribbean, along the U.S.-Mexico border—places, like Haiti, where life seemed to be lived on the stoop and in the street. Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different than the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.

Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light 65.00

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Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light

Photographs by Alex Webb. Text by Geoff Dyer.

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View cart Description The Suffering of Light is the first comprehensive monograph charting the career of acclaimed American photographer Alex Webb. Gathering some of his most iconic images, many of which were taken in the far corners of the earth, this exquisite book brings a fresh perspective to his extensive catalog. Recognized as a pioneer of American color photography since the 1970s, Webb has consistently created photographs characterized by intense color and light. His work, with its richly layered and complex composition, touches on multiple genres, including street photography, photojournalism, and fine art, but as Webb claims, “to me it all is photography. You have to go out and explore the world with a camera.” Webb’s ability to distill gesture, color and contrasting cultural tensions into single, beguiling frames results in evocative images that convey a sense of enigma, irony and humor. Featuring key works alongside previously unpublished photographs, The Suffering of Light provides the most thorough examination to date of this modern master’s prolific, 30-year career.

Alex Webb (born in San Francisco, 1952) has published more than fifteen books, including Aperture titles Brooklyn: The City Within (2019, with Rebecca Norris Webb), La Calle: Photographs from Mexico (2016), On Street Photography and the Poetic Image (2014, with Rebecca Norris Webb), and a survey of his color work, The Suffering of Light (2011). Webb has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 1979. His work has been shown widely, and he has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Details

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 204
Publication date: 2011-05-31
Measurements: 13.2 x 12.2 x 0.9 inches
ISBN: 9781597111737

Press

The images – rich in color and visual rhythm – span 30 years and several continents. Of course, Haiti and the Mexican border are well represented, locales that opened up a new way to see.He has been able to render Haiti – a place often depicted for its chaos – with a precise eye, finding personal moments that are as still as they are complex. He can use shadows as skillfully as a be-bop musician to set the tempo. The people in his frames can look like dwarfs being stomped on by giant, disembodied feet. He can make an American street seem far more foreboding than any Third World slum.–David Gonzalez”The New York Times” (12/18/2011)

Contributors

Alex Webb was born in San Francisco in 1952. His photographs have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Life, Stern, and National Geographic and exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the International Center of Photography and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. He is a recipient of the Leica Medal of Excellence (2000) and a member of Magnum Photos.
Geoff Dyer is the author of “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, “among other novels, and several nonfiction books, including “Out of Sheer Rage”. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 for “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition”. He lives in Los Angeles.

Not a typical documentary photographer or photojournalist, I’ve worked essentially as a street photographer, exploring the world with the camera, allowing the rhythm and the life of the street to guide and inform the work. For me, everything comes, first and foremost, from the street. Whatever insights—sociopolitical, cultural, or aesthetic—I may have into the societies I have photographed over the years come not from preconception, but from the process of wandering the street. At times, I feel the street can sometimes be a kind of bellwether, hinting at sociopolitical changes to come.

Over the years, my way of seeing in color, which first emerged in the tropics, has expanded into various projects, leading me not just to other parts of Latin America and to Africa, but also to Florida and to Istanbul. I have been consistently drawn to places of cultural and often political uncertainty—borders, islands, edges of societies—where cultures merge, sometimes clashing, sometimes fusing. Some of my projects have taken years to complete. Others have been briefer. Many have overlapped. Sequenced more or less chronologically, this book reflects the sometimes chaotic, sometimes mysterious process of creation, interweaving projects and obsessions, themes and passions, cultural tensions and offbeat moments, into one continuous chronicle of the street, from 1979 to the present.