The Suffering of Light: Thirty Years of Images
Exhibition | Alex Webb
Whose Streets?
Photographers often agonize over the distinction between taking a picture and making one, colonizing the subject or being swept up in its moment. Alex Webb is so completely woven into the heart of his images there can be no question that he is present with a capital P. The dirty sky, the multiple light sources, the manic shadowing, the cohabitation of the living and the inanimate, Webb is looking through one thing to show us another. But to characterize Webb's fragmented proscenium as chaotic misses his primary point. Everything is intentional. It only looks random because it happens all at once. So his lens washes each composition with subplot, and layers the actual with the surreal. CUBA, Sancti Spiritus will remind you of the postmodern artifice of Philip-Lorca diCorcia or Jeff Wall, minus the painstaking stagecraft. USA. San Ysidro, California, 1979 is such a perfect tableaux, it practically defies its own truth. GREECE, Thessaloniki, 2003 makes a glowing frame of a popcorn stand. BOQUILLAS, Mexico-Jumping, 1979 reinvents Henri Lartigue. Havana, 2001 takes André Kertész to task. In all of them, Webb is front and center, struggling to make sense of our messiness.
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Culture Review
Bichonnade Leaping
Jacques-Henri Lartigue -
Culture Review
New York City
Lee Friedlander -
Culture Review
Satiric Dancer
Andre Kertesz -
Culture Review
Untitled (Frontier Sign)
William Eggleston
