Portfolio Alex Webb
ALEX WEBB
Alex Webb (San Francisco, 1952) is an internationally renowned photographer and his photography is known and recognizable for one characteristic in particular, color: "The fiery light and the power of color seemed somehow imprinted in the cultures I was working; with; it was a different planet from the gray-brown privacy of New England, in which I had grown up. Since then I have worked almost exclusively with color. ”(Alex Webb) His images are dense, bright, recounting places and situations in the world down to their most unusual folds. At the beginning of his career, in the mid-seventies, following in the footsteps of his masters, Webb photographs in black and white but soon realized that another language, and a different stylistic code, were closer to his sensitivity. On a trip to Haiti in 1975, Webb changed his way of seeing and photographing. From that moment on, color became an obligatory narrative choice, so much so that it pushed him to look for places where light and colors become, with a sometimes cruel force, basic elements for understanding and describing a territory. Having joined the Magnum agency in 1976, Webb does not like to call himself a photojournalist but rather feels like a street photographer, due to the empathic approach with which he faces every trip, every job. Haiti, the Caribbean, Mexico, Ethiopia, Costa Rica, Brazil, but also Russia and the New England of his origins, are all stages of his photographic reconnaissance. In his images the light is strong, violent, exasperated; enhances shadows and colors. Alex Webb's photos are complex, full of elements, of reflected surfaces, of openings that multiply the levels of reading.
Alex Webb has published 14 books, including The Suffering of Light, a monograph that collects 30 years of photographs. He has exhibited his works in museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. His work is present in important international public and private collections, such as Alcobendas Art Center, Madrid; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Az .; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Davison Art Center, Wesleyan College, Middleton, Conn; Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge, Mass; Italian Foundation for Photography, Turin; Fuji Museum, Japan George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; International Center of Photography, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; .Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Peabody Museum, Cambridge; Portland Museum of Art, Portland; Provincetown Art Association Museum, Provincetown; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach; University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has appeared in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, Geo and other magazines. He has received many awards and recognitions, among others the Hasselblad Foundation Grant in 1998 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
