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Alex Webb on Reimagining a Photobook, Twenty-Five Years Later
In a new edition of a long out-of-print volume, Webb draws from photographs across many locations. Here, he considers the act of photography as a form of dislocation in itself.
About twenty-five years ago, I was looking at a group of photographs that intrigued and somewhat puzzled me. None of these rather curious stray images had yet found their way into any of my books. It wasn’t just that the photographs didn’t fit the geographic parameters of the recent books I had published on Florida and the Amazon River, but also that they seemed almost placeless. As I selected and sequenced the images—seeing visual links, trying to understand the nature of the work—I began to realize that many of them struck a note of dislocation: inevitably geographically, as they were taken all over the world, but also sometimes emotionally, visually, psychologically, culturally. There was often something just a little odd, a little strange. As I shaped and expanded the sequence, it became clear that they belonged together as a single body of work.
In 1998, I was invited to publish a limited edition artist book of this work by Harvard’s Film Study Center. Dislocations was an experiment in alternative bookmaking—a notion that seems a bit quaint these days, what with the vast variety of photographic books now being produced. Dislocations was printed in an edition of forty with four artist proofs. It was an accordion book with Canon laser prints (then considered state of the art) of some fifty photographs tipped in on debossed pages, with titles that I handwrote. And, it came in a unique collapsible box.
Alex Webb: Dislocations
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Alex Webb: Dislocations
Photographs by Alex Webb. Text by Alex Webb. Designed by David Chickey.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 128
Number of images: 80
Publication date: 2023-11-28
Measurements: 11.8 x 10.2 inches
ISBN: 9781597115445
“This exquisitely crafted book, in keeping with Webb’s characteristic style, offers a new perspective on his vast oeuvre and addresses the tangible sense of dislocation prevalent in our contemporary age.” —Editorial Staff, Exibart
“. . . Webb’s astute eye has discerned intriguing dissonances in city streets, plazas, and rooftops across the globe. His pulsating compositions puzzle, delight, and converse, even as they point to recent, forced separations and a continuing plague of displacements. No small part of Webb’s genius is the way he bathes his images in joyful vibrancy and regards his subjects with ardent empathy.” —Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy, What Will You Remember?
Alex Webb (born in San Francisco, 1952) has published more than fifteen books, including Aperture titles Brooklyn: The City Within (2019, with Rebecca Norris Webb), La Calle: Photographs from Mexico (2016), On Street Photography and the Poetic Image (2014, with Rebecca Norris Webb), and a survey of his color work, The Suffering of Light (2011). Webb has been a full member of Magnum Photos since 1979. His work has been shown widely, and he has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
Since creating the first version, I’ve continued to produce other dislocated images. Three years ago, during another kind of dislocation—in sequestration for the coronavirus in the spring of 2020 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts—I started putting together this new, expanded edition on the magnetic walls of my Cape Cod studio. I began selecting images from the more than twenty years since the original publication, as well as work from the first edition and a few earlier unpublished images. This new version of Dislocations—with some eighty photographs made on five continents—incorporates nearly half of the original photographs from the first edition, with the lion’s share comprised of later images.
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Looking back, perhaps I was drawn to reimagining and enlarging this series during the pandemic in part because it was impossible to create such images in a world dominated by closed borders and disrupted travel.
All photographs courtesy the artist
This text originally appeared in Dislocations (Aperture, 2023).