The idea of home has taken on different configurations
in Rebecca’s and Alex’s work. Born in Rushville, Ind.,
in 1956, Rebecca is originally a poet, and where she is
from and her original vocation greatly influence her
photographic work. Aside from the projects she has
worked on with Alex—”Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs
From Cuba,” “Memory City,” “Slant Rhymes,”
and “Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street
Photography and the Poetic Image,” a distillation of
the workshops they teach around the world—her most
startling book is “My Dakota,” which was published in
2012. What was initially a book about the Black Hills of
South Dakota—where she moved at the age of 15 with
her family—turned into something more ruminative following
the sudden death of her brother. The book, which
weaves poetry and images, became a meditation of the
idea of home and the way grief and sadness can embed
themselves in the landscape of a place. More recently,
she has been working on a project called Night Calls, for
which she retraces the route of her 99-year-old father’s
house calls through Rush County, Ind., documenting the
process along the way.
Alex, in some ways, has explored the idea of home
elsewhere. Born in San Francisco in 1952 and raised in
New England, he attended Harvard University, where he
majored in history and literature and studied photography
at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Steeped
in the black-and-white photojournalism of the period,
he began working as a professional photographer in
1974, moving to New York City two years later. Much of
his early work explored parts of the Deep South and life
along the U.S.-Mexico border, but it was the images that
he started producing in the late 1970s, mostly working
in the Caribbean and Mexico, that precipitated a shift to
shooting in color, for which he is best known. His first
book, “Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds: Photographs From
the Tropics,” was published in 1986, marking him as one
of the most distinctive photographers of his generation.
More projects, expansions on the trips he was regularly
making to the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, resulted
in the books “Under a Grudging Sun: Photographs
from Haiti Libéré,” “From the Sunshine State: Photographs
of Florida,” “Amazon: From the Floodplains to
the Clouds” and “La Calle,” a collection of his photographs
from Mexico, among others. Alex is currently at
work on a project documenting various American cities,
such as Houston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Chicago.
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Left, Alex Webb, Park Slope, 2018.