My Dakota: Reviewed in Orion Magazine

©Rebecca Norris Webb, “Ghost Mountain,” from “My Dakota” reviewed in the current issue of Orion Magazine, Nov./Dec. 2013

“If grief had a landscape, what shape would it take? Rebecca Norris Webb’s moving photographs of South Dakota, her home place, suggest the contours of such a shape, from portraits of an endless horizon to a close-up of a row of apples, bruised and scattered beside a country road.

Composed of 42 images and a few brief lines of handwritten text, My Dakota is both a monument to a place and an elegy for a person, the author’s brother, whose heart failed without warning in 2006.  The circumstances of loss find their way into this collection: there’s an urgent quality about those roadside apples and a suddenness captured in the taut muscles of a bird dog.  The most arresting of these photographs achieve their sense of alarm indirectly, or at least angularly, via a detail seen through a rearview mirror, a sliver of open curtain, a spill of light through trees.  Our landscapes contain every part of us, Webb seems to say, the broken and the whole.”—Scott Gast, Orion Magazine review of “My Dakota,” November/December 2013 issue

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS, EXHIBITIONS, AND TALKS WITH ALEX AND REBECCA:

——Friday Jan. 17 thru Sunday Jan. 19, FINDING YOUR VISION @ LEICA STORE MIAMI.  Places are limited in this new weekend workshop in Miami.  For more more information, including how to enroll, please visit: 

http://www.leicastoremiami.com/collections/workshops-classes-and-trips/products/alex-webb-rebecca-norris-webb-workshop-finding-your-vision-fri-sat-sun-jan-17-19-2014

——Saturday May 3 thru Friday May 10, FINDING YOUR VISION, NEW YORK.  For more information including how to enroll, please visit: 

http://www.webbnorriswebb.co/#mi=4&pt=0&pi=3

——Friday, Oct. 18, 2013 thru Feb. 2, 2014, “My Dakota” and “Violet Isle” at the Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona, Florida; artist talk, book signing, and opening reception with Alex and Rebecca on Friday, Oct. 18th, 6-8pm:

http://www.smponline.org/lectures.html#.UiS0jBbB50A

Tags: Orion Magazine, Orion Magazine review, Rebecca Norris Webb, South Dakota