SLANT RHYMES is now available in the US! Your can order online at DAP here.
Slant Rhymes is a photographic conversation between two renowned authors and artists, Magnum photographer Alex Webb and poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb. Selected from photographs taken during the Webbs’ nearly 30-year relationship (a friendship evolving into a marriage and creative partnership), this group of 80 photographs is laid out in pairs—one by Alex, one by Rebecca—to create a series of visual rhymes that talk to one another, often at a slant and in intriguing and revealing ways.
“Sometimes we find our photographic slant rhymes share a similar palette or tone or geometry,” writes Alex Webb in the introduction to the book. “Other times, our paired photographs strike a similar note—often a penchant for surreal or surprising or enigmatic moments—although often in two different keys.”
In this volume, the artists’ photographs—many of which are published here for the first time—are interwoven with short text pieces by the Webbs. A deeply personal book, beautifully produced as an intimate clothbound edition with a tipped-on cover, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb: Slant Rhymes is an unfinished love poem, told at a slant.
RECENTLY
—“Il y a quelque chose qui me fascine dans ces endroits où à un moment vous pouvez avoir l’impression que vous êtes profondément au coeur du Mexique, et une rue plus loin cela ressemble à une étrange extension des États-Unis.”—Alex Webb from interview with photographer David Belay on Yonder (in French).
—“Above all, what drives me is simple curiosity: to see what different worlds look and feel like. The only way I can get a sense of a place is to wander its streets.”—Alex Webb from interview on Magnum Photos about “Houston’s Diversity is America’s Future” in Pacific Standard Magazine, July issue.
—”And I think that when we are working on a project, there are moments of charge or spark or sublimity that really make the other moments resonate. For me, one of those moments was a photograph I took on Lake Geneva, of blue netted bunting fluttering in the wind, with a backdrop of the blue lake and the blue sky. It felt like the landscape had opened up in a way quite important to my larger project. I know this is a photograph of mine you particularly love, and I think it’s because you recognize that it springs something open.”—Teju Cole, from Rebecca’s L’arte di Partenza column, “Three Questions with Teju Cole.”
—MADRID: Slant Rhymes joint exhibition by the Webbs at La Fabrica has been extended through the end of August 2017. Follow this link to learn more about the new book and exhibition.
—WARSAW, POLAND: ALEX WEBB: SELECTIONS exhibition at Leica’s 6×7 Gallery, Warsaw, through August 20, 2017. Link in Polish about exhibition.
—ROLLING STONE ITALY features a selection of work from My Dakota at OF, Milan.
—ALEX & REBECCA INTERVIEW ON ARTRIBUNE, ITALY (in Italian).
—REBECCA’S PHOTOGRAPHS IN NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE. You can see her photographs now online here, and read the story, “An Improbably 6,000-Mile Boat Trip Around the East Coast,” by Jamie Lauren Keiles.
—ALEX WEBB SHARES THE SECRET TO HIS SUCCESS, Huck Magazine.
©Teju Cole, Zurich, from Blind Spot and Black Paper exhibition at Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC, through August 11, 2017
WORKSHOP NEWS
—NEW WORKSHOP JUST ANNOUNCED: FINDING YOUR VISION: NYC 2018: Friday May 4, 2018-Wednesday May 9, 2018.
APPLICATIONS OPEN: TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 2017 (Any former Webb Workshop students can pre-register one week before, Tuesday Sept. 5, 2017.)
STAY TUNED: Workshop and application details coming late August 2017
BOOK UPDATES
—LINK TO VIDEO OF SLANT RHYMES/RIMAS DE REOJO, where you can also order RIMAS DE REOJO, the Spanish edition, directly from our small publisher, La Fabrica in Madrid. Link to order SLANT RHYMES ON AMAZON UK. SLANT RHYMES NOW AVAILABLE IN THE UK, AS WELL AS SPAIN. Link to video of the book at PhotoBookStore UK.
—MY DAKOTA, 2nd edition, by Rebecca is available through Radius Books here.
—THE APERTURE WORKSHOP BOOK, 3d edition now available—Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image—online at Amazon (US), as well as Amazon in France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Italy, Japan, India, and the UK.
—LA CALLE: Photographs from Mexico, by Alex, available through Aperture here.
©Rebecca Norris Webb, Badlands from My Dakota, 2nd ed. available now on Radius Books website here.
LINK TO INTERVIEW WITH REBECCA ABOUT MY DAKOTA WITH NEW YORK TIMES LENS BLOG’S JIM ESTRIN: “On Prairie, Poetry, and Loss”
LA CALLE REVIEWS
“One never gets the sense that the photographs of Alex Webb’s LA CALLE (Aperture, $60), a collection of streetscapes taken in Mexico between 1975 and 2007, were thought out much in advance. The pictures here present hectic (or eerily still) scenes in medias res, in which something has just happened, or is perhaps about to happen. Webb thrives on this uncertainty, creating compositions that give the impression that he has just shown up, and is in the process of trying to figure the situation out. The viewer, too, strives to piece together the overload of information: When looking at these brightly colored photographs, it can be difficult to settle on a focal point, or to see how the seemingly unrelated story lines interact. A singe shot may show vendors, lovers, a bicyclist, children playing, and dogs. The mood can be tough to pin down, too, as people’s faces register wildly different emotions, ranging from laughter to fear to tears. While each photo here looks curiously at the collective action it presents, the volume as a whole concerns itself with even more far-reaching connections. As Webb asks: What is the relationship between these portraits, one of which shows a man who appears to have been shot in the street, and the baroque drug violence that has erupted in the country? Webb resists definite answers, but his images suggest, in addition to a celebration of life on the street, a certain volatility—homelessness, poverty, and areas hemmed in by walls. One photo captures a foot blurring in movement as its owner disappears over a fence. True to form, Webb leaves us wondering what is being fled, and whether this was a successful escape.”—Michael Miller, from Bookforum’s Roundup of Best Art Books of 2016.
“In 1978, Webb took a picture of a boy staring warily in a Mexican graveyard, with a horse silhouetted high on a hill in the distance. The image is typical of the Magnum photographer’s three decades of work in Mexico, an engine of both awe and empathy. Webb shot mostly in color, with an eye for hot reds, sky blues, and dusty terra cottas. But in nearly every image such brightness is offset by deep shadow. Some compositions are as stark and strange as anything by de Chirico, but, more typically, the frame is alive with incident: four gesturing figures are anchored by the glass cannisters of a cold-drink stand; three women bend down in grief around a body lying crumpled in the gutter.”—New Yorker review of La Calle, September 2016
NY Times Lens blog video interview with Jim Estrin and Alex
©Alex Webb, from La Calle: Photographs from Mexico, Aperture, 2016
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