TWO LOOKS: NYTimes, Nat’l Geographic

©Alex Webb, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1976

Q. Jim Estrin, New York Times Lens Blog:

Had you ever been to Mississippi before? Was it similar to anything you had seen before or different?

A.  Alex Webb:

It was my first trip to Mississippi. I had photographed in some small towns in Alabama prior to visiting Mound Bayou; however, those towns were segregated — unlike Mound Bayou, there were no black town officials, no black police officers, and if there were black-owned businesses, they were in the black part of town.

Visiting Mound Bayou for the first time, I was completely unprepared for the intensity of the emotional experience of being welcomed and embraced by a culture so different than my own. I recall one moment when Ellie, the woman whom I first met at Smitty’s, suddenly turned to me, reached up and put her two hands on either side of my head and said, “I ain’t never touched the hair of a white man before.” Needless to say, as a young, white kid from Cambridge, Mass., I was stunned and deeply moved.

Link to read the rest of the Q&A with Jim Estrin and see the complete Mound Bayou slide show:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/alex-webb-looks-back-in-black-and-white/?smid=tw-share

ALEX’S PHOTOGRAPHS FROM INDIA’S KUMBH MELA IN FEBRUARY 2014 ISSUE:

 

 

 

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/02/kumbh-mela/spinney-text

 

©Alex Webb, Kumbh Mela in February 2014 issue of National Geographic Magazine

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

——Saturday May 3 thru Friday May 10, FINDING YOUR VISION, NEW YORK.  A few spots left in this annual workshop. For more information including how to enroll, please visit: 

https://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAXO31_3&VBID=2K1HZOQ8HF290Z&IID=2K1HRG8E8ABS&PN=3

——Friday, Dec. 13 thru Feb. 22, 2014: BEFORE THE SHIFT: The Early Black-and-White Work of Alex Webb, Lynne Cohen, Martin Parr, and Stephen Shore at at the Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago; opening reception with Alex, Friday, Dec. 13, 5:30-8pm:

http://www.stephendaitergallery.com/dynamic/exhibit_display.asp?EventID=2&Exhibit=Currrent&ExhibitID=175

 

©Rebecca Norris Webb, Junipers, from A Field Guide to Silence

A shelter

or a ship

these junipers?

 

A black bough flies into the night.

Now even the snow

is the shadow of an owl.

—Rebecca Norris Webb, from “A Field Guide to Silence”

POSTINGS: December 2009

This month we’re featuring TWO PUBLICATIONS, one that features a series of Alex’s early black-and-white photography, TWO LINKS, including a video that explores the lives and work of Australian photographers Trent Parke and Narelle Autio, who we featured in last month’s TWO LOOKS column, and, lastly, TWO VIEWS of a creature of the night.––Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb

Alex Webb, Mound Bayou, Mississippi, 1976

TWO PUBLICATIONS:  ALEX’S EARLY WORK and NEW MAGAZINE

Since 1979, I have photographed almost entirely in color.  However, prior to that, I was totally committed to working in black-and-white.  This month, a literary journal, the Threepenny Review, has a selection of some of my black-and-white work, ranging from an early series on teenagers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I produced in 1972 and 1973, while I was in college, to work from my first trips to Haiti (1975), the Mississippi Delta (1976-77), and the U.S.-Mexico Border (1975 and 1978).  It also happens to be the Threepenny Review’s thirtieth anniversary issue, so congratulations to Wendy Lesser, the review’s founder.

Since a number of our workshop participants are street photographers, we thought we would also mention there’s a new biannual periodical featuring street photography, called Publication, which is published by the In-Public street photographer Nick Turpin and which is now accepting online submissions. –– Alex Webb

TWO LINKS: TRENT AND NARELLE VIDEO; ICP SERIES

Since we featured Trent Parke and Narelle Autio in our last Two Looks posting (November 23, 2009), we thought we’d link you to this video, called Dreamlives 2002, that explores their work –– including both their photojournalism assignments and their more personal projects –– as well as their relationship.

Garry Winogrand, from the book, The Animals

The International Center of Photography also has links to videos of talks by noted photographers, but I was especially intrigued with their audio programs, including the link below to a talk by the late great street photographer Garry Winogrand, author of The Animals,  an inspiration for Rebecca’s first book, The Glass Between Us.––Alex Webb

TWO VIEWS: CREATURE OF THE NIGHT

Rebecca Norris Webb, from the series, On Extended Wings

I’d like to leave you with TWO VIEWS of the owl, a creature long associated with the night and wisdom and death.  Appropriately, I’ve included a poem by the late M. Wyrebek, a poet who spent most of her short life battling cancer, and perhaps because of that struggle, her poetry is unflinching and courageous, open to both suffering and mystery. Her poignant poem, Night Owl, below, from her award-winning book, Be Properly Scared, relates an encounter she had while driving home through the countryside late one night after receiving troubling news about her cancer. “It’s as if a night owl becomes her Virgilian guide into the vast night,” wrote her friend and fellow poet, Edward Hirsch.

I’ve paired Night Owl with a recent unpublished photograph of mine (above), which I took in Morocco in October.  It’s part of my new series, On Extended Wings, inspired in part by this quote by the poet Li-Young Lee: “Only birds can reveal to us dying by flying.”––Rebecca Norris Webb

NIGHT OWL

Driving my bad news the back way home

I know I’m in the land that is life

when I reach my favorite stretch of road –– fields

flat and wide where corn appears soon after

planting the soil tilled, night-soaked

and crumbled into fists.

Ferguson’s barn is somewhere

at the end of this long arm of tar

and as I near it, something grazes the back

passenger-side door, luffs parallel to my car ––

a huge owl on headlight spray floating,

holding night over the hood to see

if this moving think is real, alive,

something to kill –– then gliding in

close as if to taste glass.

The road levitates, buffeted on a surf

of light, the fog-eaten farm disappearing

as I ride into starlessness, cells conspiring

so I am bright-flecked and uplifted –– is this

what it feels like to be chosen –– to be taken

under the wing of something vast

that knows its way blindly?