On Memory City: A Conversation with Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

Abstract

For the past several years, Alex Webb and Rebecca Nrorris Webb have been photographing in Rochester, New York, home of the Eastman Kodak Company. Kodak went through bankruptcy in 2012--13, during the period Webb and Norris Weeb were photographing the images that resulted in their book Memory City, published by Radius Books in 2014. The jalowing interview took place in the firm of an email exchange in preparation fir the first Memory City exhibition and book launch, both in conjunction with the Visual Studies Workshop biannual Photo-Bookworks Symposium. June 26--28. 2014, in Rochester, New York. Alex Webb is best known for his vibrant and complex color work, especially from Latin America and the Caribbean. He has published eleven books, including The Suffering of Light, a survey book of thirty years of his color photographs; and Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (with Rebecca Norris Webb, 2009), the latter exhibited at the Museum or Fine Arts, Boston, in 2011. Alex has exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta: and the Museum of Contemporary Art Sari Diego. His work has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Geo, and other publications. He has received numerous awards and grants, including a Hasselblad Award in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Rebecca Norris Webb has published five photography books: The Glass Between Us (2006); Violet Isle: A Duel of Photographs from Cuba (with Alex Webb, 2009); My Dakota (2012); Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image (2014); and Memory City (with Alex Webb, 2014). Originally a poet, Rebecca often makes books that interweave her text and photographs, most notably My Dakota, selected as one of the best photography books of 2012 by PDN, Photo-Eye, and Time. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the George Eastman in Rochester, New York. Her work has appeared in Time, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, National Geographic, and. Le Monde Magazine. MEREDITH DAVENPORT: How did the idea for Memory City emerge? Did your ideas develop separately and then move together, or did the process go back and forth? ALEX WEBB: For both Rebecca and myself. the creation ol our previous two books were intense and emotionally exhausting experiences: Rebecca publishing My Dakota, a book on South Dakota that became an elegy for her brother, who died unexpectedly; and my completing The Suffer* of Light (2011), a survey book that forced me to look back and 'evaluate thirty years of color work. We wanted to do something very different, so when I was invited to Rochester to be part of a Magnum Photos project on the city [Ed. note see House of Pictures: A Conversation with Susan Meiselas, in Afterimage 41, no. 1], we decided to explore doing a project together. What was particularly difficult and daunting about the project was that, unlike our only other fully collaborative project, Violet Isle, which emerged organically out of two separate projects, this book was conceived as a collaborative work from the beginning. After each trip we would look at our respective bodies of work and try to see just where our photographs seemed to be taking us. I began to move from the street to exploring events. Rebecca discovered and expanded the themes of dresses and women that dominate her work from Rochester. After the fourth trip we began to put together a series of book dummies that ultimately resulted in the book as it is. We also brought David Chickey, the creative director of Radius Books, into the project much earlier than we usually involve a publisher: We realized that David understood exactly what we were doing and that his design and conceptual insights were crucial to the development of the project. REBECCA NORRIS WEBB: Alex and I have long been drawn to the layered qualilties of cities--that sense of city as palimpsest. …