Alex Webb And Rebecca Norris Webb On Street Photography And The Poetic Image

In this series, Aperture Foundation works with the world's top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography-offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, internationally acclaimed color photographers Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, offer their expert insight into street photography and the poetic image. Through words and photographs-their own and others'-they invite the reader into the heart of their artistic processes. They share their thoughts about a wide range of practical and philosophical issues, from questions about seeing and being in the world with a camera, to how to shape a complete body of work in a way that's both structured and intuitive.

In 2005, Rebecca Norris Webb set out to photograph her home state of South Dakota, a sparsely populated frontier state on the Great Plains with more buffalo, pronghorn, mule deer and prairie dogs than people. South Dakota is a land of powwows and rodeos, corn palaces and buffalo roundups; a harsh and beautiful landscape dominated by space, silence, brutal wind and extreme weather. The next year, however, everything changed for Norris Webb, when her brother died unexpectedly of heart failure. "For months," she writes in the introduction to this volume, "one of the few things that eased my unsettled heart was the landscape of South Dakota. For each of us, does loss have its own geography?" My Dakota is a small intimate book about the west and its weathers, and an elegy for a lost brother.

Review 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 2011-12-18) A 30-year retrospective of a great, and often overlooked, American pioneer of colour photography who pays scant regard to genre boundaries, merging art photography, photojournalism and often complex street photographs. (Sean O'Hagan The Guardian 2011-12-13) In far-flung corners of the globe, Webb captures glimpses of beauty in impoverished lives and stoicism in the face of strife. (Jack Crager American Photo 2011-12-01).

In The Photography Workshop Series, Aperture Foundation works with the world's top photographers to distill their creative approaches, teachings, and insights on photography- offering the workshop experience in a book. Our goal is to inspire photographers of all levels who wish to improve their work, as well as readers interested in deepening their understanding of the art of photography. Each volume is introduced by a well-known student of the featured photographer. In this book, Mary Ellen Mark-well-known for her pictures' emotional power, be they of people or animals-offers her insight on observing the world and capturing dramatic moments that reveal more than the reality at hand. Through words and pictures, she shares her own creative process and discusses a wide range of issues, from gaining the trust of the subject and taking pictures that are controlled but unforced, to organizing the frame so that every part contributes toward telling the story.

"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."--

"Now ninety years old, Cartier-Bresson seldom photographs; he devotes much of his time to drawing, and remains as forceful and discerning as ever in his writings. The last section of The Mind's Eye includes his commentary on photographer friends he has known - including Robert Capa, Andre Kertesz, Ernst Haas, and Sarah Moon - which reveal the impassioned and compassionate vision for which Cartier-Bresson is beloved."--BOOK JACKET.

An introduction to the 40 year career of the American photographer.