AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Dense, layered color street photographs of Mexico, the Caribbean, Istanbul and beyond
- Works in
- Color since the late 1970s; black and white before that
- Camera
- Leica M rangefinder; Kodachrome slide film for decades, later digital
- Also
- Member of Magnum Photos since 1979; Guggenheim Fellow (2007); makes books with his wife, Rebecca Norris Webb
- Start with
- The Suffering of Light (Aperture, 2011)
- Links
Alex Webb (born 1952) is an American street photographer and a full member of Magnum Photos since 1979. He is known for complex, layered color pictures made in Mexico, the Caribbean, Istanbul and many other places. He has published more than 15 books, several of them with his wife, the photographer Rebecca Norris Webb.
The story
In 1975, Alex Webb was in his early twenties and stuck. He was photographing small-town life in the American South, in black and white. “In 1975, I reached a kind of dead end in my photography,” he later wrote. Then he picked up a novel by Graham Greene, The Comedians. It is set in Haiti under the dictator Papa Doc. Within months, Webb was on a plane to Port-au-Prince.
The trip lasted three weeks. In Haiti he found a world of emotional intensity that he had never known before. “That first three-week trip to Haiti transformed me, both as a photographer and as a human being,” he said. Soon he was also working in other places where life was lived on the stoop and in the street: the Caribbean and the US-Mexico border.
Still, his film was black and white. About three years after Haiti, he understood that the strong light and color of these places were part of the feeling, too. They seemed to belong to the cultures themselves, very different from the “gray-brown reticence” of New England, where he grew up. So he changed to color, and to Kodachrome slide film. He has worked mainly in color ever since.
On the border in San Ysidro, California, in 1979, he photographed men caught while trying to cross from Mexico. They raise their hands in a field of yellow flowers, under a helicopter and a stormy sky. Years later he spoke about this kind of contrast. “I think that terrible tragedies can happen in bright sunlight or beautiful light,” he said.
The work is slow. Webb has said he would shoot 1,500 to 2,000 rolls of film a year and come away with maybe 15 pictures. One of the best known was made in 1985, in a church plaza in Tehuantepec, Mexico. Boys are playing soccer. In front, one of them spins the ball on one finger, and the moving ball looks almost like a globe.
That dead end in 1975 sent him out into the street, and that is where his work has stayed. He still walks, mostly in the late afternoon and evening, and waits for light and people to come together. “For me, everything comes, first and foremost, from the street,” he says.
The work
- 1952Born in San Francisco
- 1972Studies at the Apeiron Workshops
- 1974Graduates from Harvard and starts as a photojournalist
- 1975Feels stuck in black and white; a novel sends him to Haiti
- 1979Becomes a full member of Magnum Photos; begins his long body of color work
- 1986Publishes his first book, Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds
- 2007Receives a Guggenheim Fellowship; publishes Istanbul
- 2011Publishes The Suffering of Light
- 2026Solo show Selections at Leica Galerie Salzburg
Lessons
Follow your curiosity. A novel sent him to Haiti, and three weeks there changed his work and his life.
Let the place lead. He moved to color because color was part of the life he saw in the Caribbean and Mexico.
Walk more. When a day is not working, he simply walks further. He works mostly in the late afternoon and evening.
Try this: go out in the last two hours of daylight. Find a scene with something near, something in the middle and something far away. Wait until all three come alive in one frame.
Gear
Webb rarely talks about camera models. What is known comes from his interviews and from Leica.
Leica M rangefinder: he has worked mostly with Leica M cameras. He likes the small size, which lets him photograph quietly. A rangefinder, he says, lets him see moments happening at the same time on different planes.
Kodachrome slide film: his color film from the late 1970s until Kodachrome was discontinued.
Digital camera: the end of Kodachrome was the main reason he started working digitally. When he makes prints, he often adds a little grain.
Books
The Suffering of Light (Aperture, 2011). His first full career monograph, 204 pages, with text by the writer Geoff Dyer. It brings together his best-known color pictures with photographs never published before, sequenced as one continuous story of the street from 1979 onward. Haiti, Mexico, the border, Cuba, Istanbul and many other places sit side by side. The book to start with if you want to see thirty years of his work in one place.
Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds: Photographs from the Tropics (Thames & Hudson, 1986). His first book, with 76 color photographs from places south of the United States, including Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Barbados. There is no long essay: a short passage from Carlos Fuentes’s novel The Hydra Head is the only introduction. Reviewers at the time praised the intense color and tight compositions. A book for collectors and for anyone curious how his color style first looked in print.
Istanbul: City of a Hundred Names (Aperture, 2007). A 136-page book of color photographs made over seven years, starting in 1998, with an essay by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. Webb was drawn to Istanbul as a border city between Europe and Asia, a place “where cultures come together.” The pictures move from mosques and ferries to markets, cafes and busy streets. Good for readers who love cities and how the past lives inside the present.
La Calle: Photographs from Mexico (Aperture and Televisa Foundation, 2016). 85 photographs, 180 pages, all made on the streets of Mexico between 1975 and 2007. The texts are by five Mexican writers: Guillermo Arriaga, Álvaro Enrigue, Valeria Luiselli, Guadalupe Nettel and Mónica de la Torre. It includes the Tehuantepec picture from 1985. The best book for seeing how one country shaped his way of working over three decades.
In his words
“I like the notion that things that seem paradoxical can coexist.”
Today I am here with a review of an iconic book by legendary photographer Alex Webb, The Suffering of Light. So, let’s check out the book and the photographs.