PHOTO-EYE BEST BOOKS 2018

Rebecca Norris Webb's favorite book from 2018

In a sea of photobooks, one keeps rising to the surface: Meghann Riepenhoff’s beautiful and poetic pair of “sister books,” Littoral Drift and Ecotone, conjoined by the same Z binding. During such a trying yet inspiring year politically and artistically for so many of us women, Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes — especially those in Ecotone, in which she collaborates with rain and other forms of precipitation — serve to remind us that the ever-changing weather of our lives, can also affect photographic history, notably the long-overlooked Anna Atkins, a 19th-century amateur botanist, who is now widely acknowledged as the first person to illustrate a book with light-sensitive materials. Her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions was a direct influence on Riepenhoff’s work. Look carefully at Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes, and you’ll see other female gazes inspiring her work, including abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler’s “soak-stain” paintings. And if you listen closely enough, you may also hear, “If a color cannot cure, can it at least incite hope?” from Maggie Nelson’s lyric essay, "Bluets," a set of meditations on the color blue. For in times like these, what can we women landscape photographers do but immerse ourselves deeply in our work, and try to remain open — as Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes remind us — to collaborations with the shifting waves and weathers of the natural world, which is just as vulnerable and powerful as we are.

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Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her six books, most notably with My Dakota — an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly. Her seventh book, Brooklyn: The City Within — about the borough where she lives with her husband and creative partner, Alex Webb, the book’s joint author — will be published by Aperture in fall 2019. www.webbnorriswebb.co www.instagram.com/webb_norriswebb

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Rebecca Norris Webb's favorite book from 2018

During such trying political times, one of my anchors is a dog-eared volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry on my bedside table. How did she manage to produce so many of her most memorable poems during the Civil War? How does her work somehow embody the essence of all that death and civil strife, while rarely mentioning the violent conflict directly?

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Dickinson writes, a line that’s inspired Aaron Schuman’s SLANT, a kind of creative conversation with the poet and her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, during another deeply divided era in our country’s history. So much of the book is at a slant, including Schuman’s surreal photographs (a slide mysterious atop a building, a pair of skid marks that looks whimsically like a child’s drawing of legs, with feet turned sideways) and the wit that infuses the book’s text pieces, copied from the local police blotter, some that are laugh-out-loud funny, others darker and more troubling, raising questions about our society’s growing distrust and paranoia. I’m especially drawn to how the text and Schuman’s photographs rhyme with each other, fittingly at a slant. Long after I closed the book, one pair continues to linger in my mind. Near the end of the book, the text about a woman reporting something strange in the night sky (“Police determined the light was coming from a star.”) is a slant rhyme with the book’s final image, which perhaps is a star and its constellation, or another heavenly body? Or maybe it’s the remains of fireworks, or some other visual disturbance? In such unsettling times, it seems right somehow that SLANT’s ending is uncertain—like the dash that ends Dickinson’s poem: “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind—"

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Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her seven books, including her second monograph, My Dakota (Radius, 2012), and most recently her two collaborations with Alex Webb: Slant Rhymes (La Fabrica, 2017) and Brooklyn: The City Within (Aperture, 2019). Her upcoming eighth book, Night Calls, will be released in fall 2020 from Radius.
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Rebecca Norris Webb's favorite book from 2018

Imagine a creative cousin of Mike Disfarmer, someone who shared the same resolve not to follow the family legacy of becoming a farmer. But instead of moving, like Disfarmer, from his birthplace in rural Indiana to Heber Springs, Arkansas, where he’d eventually become the town’s studio photographer, John Alinder remained in the same Swedish village his entire life — Sävasta — and photographed his rural community. Unlike Disfarmer, Alinder’s eye is often more intimate — the gaze of someone who grew up with the people he photographed, and knew them well. I was completely captivated by the playfulness of the portraits, particularly the two young women perched in a tree, who, on first glance, seem to be floating somehow — not unlike many of Alinder’s rural scenes, which feel mysteriously suspended in time.

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Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves text and photographs in her eight books, including My Dakota and most recently, Night Calls, the latter in which she retraced the route of some of her country doctor father’s house calls through the same rural county where they both were born. Her upcoming collaborative book with Alex Webb, Waves, a kind of pandemic logbook on Cape Cod, will be released in spring 2022 by Radius Books.

@webb_norriswebb
webbnorriswebb.co