Alex Webb: The Suffering of Light

The Suffering of Light

Thirty Years of Photographs by Alex Webb

“Wherever he goes, Webb always winds up in a Bermuda-shaped triangle where the distinction between photojournalism, documentary and art blur and disappear.”

Geoff Dyer

Alex Webb, a member since 1976 of the acclaimed Magnum photographic cooperative, was born in San Francisco in 1952. He studied history and literature at Harvard and photography at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

A professional photojournalist since 1974, Webb has crafted an astonishing body of images over the last few decades. Working often in the vibrant colors of the developing countries, Webb has amassed for his viewers an unusual array of fresh entry points, allowing us into a world we are usually kept out of – used as we are, to seeing it recorded in familiar and clichéd images of more ordinary reportage. Avoiding the large “evening news” statements, Webb chooses to make complicated pictures of complicated situations which remind us that there is beauty, mystery and otherness to these peoples and these lands and homes. From a laughing wrestling match under a Havana street lamp to a neon-shrouded popcorn stand seaside in Greece to a mysterious shadow-filled side street in Istanbul, Webb takes – in a second – an image whose psychological texture and formal composition could stand comparison with that of historic oil painting. Beside their contributions to cultural insight, Webb’s prints are objects of striking formal beauty where deceptive geometry, human temperament, and radiant colors combine to create one man’s unmistakable art.

Widely traveled and with countless exhibitions, (and with armfuls of awards that include the Guggenheim), Webb is at the top of his form as he looks back over thirty years in this upcoming exhibition and publication, whose title was provided by the great poet and thinker Goethe, (who wrote books about color that are still sought out and read today).

Please come and meet Alex Webb as he attends the opening reception of his first exhibition at the Stephen Daiter Gallery.