Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb: Brooklyn, The City Within

An overview of the 2019 Aperture release by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, focusing on work from their time living in Brooklyn.

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[baladino]

Hi Hashem. I greatly appreciate that you put in a lot of effort and time to make video content of film related content. I think there was a recent enquiry how best people may relate or be involved in the work you put out. I did say Patreon. But I’d like to qualify that by stating whatever works best for you. I think good and honest content without that sheen or veneer of superficiality is harder to come by these days. Concerning Alex Webb, he’s a luminary. The work he creates relegates his wife to second place. Possibly because it’s just great work. The visual weight in his work is placed so well that yes it is a work of art.

[s_kelly]

Both La Calle and Crossings are amazing but there's a bit of overlap between them, both are hard to find and crazy expensive now unfortunately!

[clarhettcoalfield]

I have the Alex Webb book on Istanbul, and am very drawn to it. Although, I suspect many people who are interested in books on photography, often search for markers of familiarity from their own past on some subconscious level. After all photographs in any printed form are fragments of time gone by, forever trapped by the photographer on film. Photographs are never of the future, or present, they can't be, so we delve further into our own experience and pull from the photography we are viewing, our experiences (so there's a built in bias of sorts) when we look, and emotionally draw from what it is we are looking at. I think that is a part of this inherent bias which pulls us, or attracts us or repels us from certain photographers or their work, it may explain why we like specific photos and dislike other photos by same photographer.

[TheFilmFellow]

Love Rebecca’s photos. To me they are beautiful sort of ocular idioms of her photographic visions with indeed a lovely feminine softness.

[faranji]

Huge Alex Webb fan here. Looking at the Brooklyn series though (I have many times but decided not to buy it) for me there's an elephant in the room. It's popular to say that the camera doesn't matter / it's just a tool / it's only the skill of the photographer that makes great work / the film vs digital debate is boring, let's get past it etc etc... The problem is none of that is really true. Alex Webb is as just as talented now as he was before - more mature perhaps as well - but his digital camera work isn't as good as the older work on Kodachrome because it doesn't LOOK as good. There are strong compositions, but It's nowhere near as beautiful. This is about as clear an example as I can think of to show how the camera / film really DOES matter. It's not just about talent, the medium isn't just something you use to make the work, it's part of the work itself.

The main reason I shoot film isn't because of the romance or the discipline, it's because it looks better than digital.

[alexandermatragos]

From what I see (I don’t own the book) the photos looked very much his style and I quite like them but I would agree that his past work is just breathtaking. Do you think another reason is that looking at photos from older times can feel nostalgic or introduce us to a world that doesn’t exist anymore? I mean looking at his photo for example in the Mexican borders with the helicopter overhead and the police arresting the Mexicans can old only make you say “Damn”. I think there is an allure in seeing images from the past. And also the time he dedicated in these parts of the world.

[AManWhoWasntThere]

I'm always sad when photographers put so many of their photos across two pages with the fold in the middle. It just ruins the picture. Important details get lost in the fold and the picture's composition gets split in two. Why do they always do that?

[albertogarcia]

Alex Webb is one of a kind. Those photobooks are wonderful, some of them are a bit on the pricey side but they are still worth it. After having a look at the Magnum interview link ( that I did not finish jet ) I found a youtube interview that the New York Times lens did to him worth checking out.
It looks to me that in his last photobook he is shooting digitally, this may be the reason why the photos do not look so dramatic as his earliest work. That look in contrast and colour on his old photographs came from colour film, similar somehow to some of the William Eggleston photographs.

[mjakotka]

This book is the only one in my collection that I regret buying. Very weak work, in my opinion. Especially for such a master like Alex Webb. About his wife’s contribution to this book I better say nothing. Disappointment.

[wunderbar-qy]

same boring style cant believe ppl buy that stuff