Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb on poetry, memory, book making and their long and abiding collaboration as both life and creative partners.
Rebecca Norris Webb was originally a journalist and a poet before falling in love with photography and transitioning to a career that has since incorporated all of those disciplines. Rebecca has produced numerous books and exhibitions, most notably her monograph, My Dakota — an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly — with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2015), among other venues.
Alex Webb is famous for his vibrant, complex colour street photography, especially that from Haiti, Cuba and Mexico, though he has more recently begun shooting on his home soil in the USA. Alex has produced sixteen photo books, won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979.
Together, as well as being husband and wife, Alex and Rebecca have shared an abiding creative partnership, collaborating on numerous book projects including Violet Isle, their work form Cuba, Memory City and Slant Rhymes . Their latest collaboration, Brooklyn: The City Within, is a book project about the New York borough which has been their home for many years, and that will be published by aperture entitled in September of 2019. Alex and Rebecca were recently recipients of an NEA grant.
On episode 105, Rebecca and Alex discuss, among other things:
Their first collaboration: Violet Isle
Their respective strengths
Memory City
Slant Rhymes
Their forthcoming book Brooklyn: The City Within
Making book dummies
Advice on collaborating
Future projects individual and together
Referenced:
David Chickey
Teju Cole
John Ashbery
Ilya Kaminsky
Marie Howe
Italo Calvino
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“I think we both realised that we were each others biggest fans, but because we were that we were also very insightful critcs and it was a sense that it would be better if we told each other what we though were the weaknesses of a project before the project went out into the world. And even though that sometimes caused tensions in the marriage, we realised that overall oit was worth going through that creatively...”
— Rebecca Norris Webb