Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb: imperfect rhymes

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Tehunatepec Mexico, 1985 By Alex Webb

After three decades of hanging out, travelling and living together, this photographer couple sorted through their individual artistic output, turned it into couplets, and made it into a book.

Slant Rhymes, the title of this 2017 book, refers to the idea that these photographers’ poetics respond to one another without overlapping. If we sought to identify their individual approach, we might venture that Alex is the master of the long sequence shot, and Rebecca of Impressionism (but then we would also add that both of them work with love, and are adept at going beyond boundaries).

Rebecca Norris Webb’s frames – she is a poet too, combining photos and poems in her books and exhibitions – often capture an instant that is of this world yet outside of this world, an impression and a transfiguration that, as for the Impressionists, often has to do with the light or atmospheric effects; Alex’s shots, on the other hand, tend to compose a meaningful whole from multiple scenes and relationships that, unravelled, provide a trigger for a possible story, appearing as a section of a longer time span we are not privy to and yet strive to imagine.