Alex Webb

Here, in Alex Webb's gripping photographs, are the world's tropics in all their vivid beauty, desperation, exuberance, and incipient violence. For more than ten years, while working on special assignments as a photojournalist, Alex Webb turned his camera to a deeper, more contemplative purpose. Though the photographs range from Mexico to the Caribbean Islands, Africa, and Asia, they are unified by Alex Webb's concern for the sense of mystery as well as the ironies and tensions which these regions all share. The tropics as we see in Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds are the tropics which such politically and culturally diverse writers as Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, and Carlos Fuentes have responded to with astonishment as well as despair. With his brilliant combination of the new aesthetics of color photography and the great modern tradition of photojournalism, Alex Webb has forged not just a new style but a passionate and sometimes terrifying vision of the world.--From jacket flap

La Calle brings together more than thirty years of photography from the streets of Mexico by Alex Webb, spanning 1975 to 2007. Whether in black and white or color, Webb's richly layered and complex compositions touch on multiple genres. As Geoff Dyer writes, "Wherever he goes, Webb always ends up in a Bermuda-shaped triangle where the distinctions between photojournalism, documentary, and art blur and disappear." Webb's ability to distill gesture, light, and cultural tensions into single, beguiling frames results in evocative images that convey a sense of mystery, irony, and humor. Following an initial trip in the mid-1970s, Webb returned frequently to Mexico, working intensely on the U.S.-Mexico border and into southern Mexico throughout the 1980s and '90s, inspired by what poet Octavio Paz calls "Mexicanism--delight in decorations, carelessness and pomp, negligence, passion, and reserve." La Calle presents a commemoration of the Mexican street as a sociopolitical bellwether--albeit one that has undergone significant transformation since Webb's first trips to the country. Newly commissioned pieces from noted Mexican and Mexican American authors lend further insight into the roles the streets have played for generations: part arterial network, part historical palimpsest, and part absurdist theater of the everyday.--Publisher website.

"Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb take an elegiac look at Rochester, New York. For this project, Alex took images with his last rolls of Kodachrome, a formerly vibrant color film that can now only be processed as black-and-white. The resulting photos have a weathered quality akin to a fading memory. Alex also took to the streets of Rochester and shot in digital color--work that punctuates the black and white work with images from his signature style. Rebecca, who still uses film for all her work, responded to the medium's uncertain future by creating an elegiac refrain of color still lifes and portraits of Rochester women past and present. Woven into the book are quotes by many of the famous writers and thinkers who have been connected to Rochester, including women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and poets John Ashbery and Ilya Kaminsky. And the authors have also created a timeline on the cultural history of the city that traces the evolution of a once-vibrant and now complex city."--

"Renowned photographers and teachers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb guide readers on a creative journey through the world of street photography and the poetic image as a path toward finding and deepening a unique photographic vision. Based on their popular international workshop, this creative couple interweaves real-world insight with stories that reveal their own creative process and influences. They touch on a variety of photographic issues essential to photographers of all levels and backgrounds, including how to photograph in cultures other than your own; how to capture luminous, poetic images in the world; how to work with color in a way that adds emotion to photographs; how complexity and creative tension affect the frame; how to hone a personal vision; and how to shape a growing body of work in an intuitive and meaningful way, one that enriches not only picture-making but also your life. This book provides rare access to the teaching and artistic practice of two leading photographers and is an indispensable tool for students, teachers and anyone who wants to take more successful pictures"--Publisher's description.

Slant Rhymes is a photographic conversation between two world renowned authors, Magnum photographer Alex Webb and poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb. Selected from photographs taken during the Webbs's nearly 30-year friendship and later marriage and creative partnership, this group of 80 photographs are paired--one by Alex, one by Rebecca--to create a series of visual rhymes that talk to one another--often at a "slant" and in intriguing and revealing ways. "Sometimes we find our photographic slant rhymes share a similar palette or tone or geometry," writes Alex Webb in the introduction to the book. "Other times, our paired photographs strike a similar note--often a penchant for surreal or surprising or enigmatic moments--although often in two different keys." These photographs, most of which are published here for the first time, are interwoven with short text pieces by Rebecca Norris Webb. The result is an unfinished love poem, told at a slant.