Alex Webb
[Photographer, b. 1952, San Francisco, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
... the possibility of one particular photographer’s pictures lying around the corner is never realized until the photographer is there. It’s one of the enigmas of photography.
I have always felt that a lot of the most interesting work, not just mine but other people’s, falls into [the] nether area, somewhere between the worlds of documentary and photojournalism (two very vague words) and the world of art. I think a lot of street photography falls into this nether area.
I work extremely intuitively. I wander, I respond. Am I aware of certain elements rationally at times? Sure. But I think that often when I am more aware of them, it usually means that the picture falls flat.
Traditional photojournalists arrive with an idea of what they are going to produce or what the editor wants. I approach a subject very much as a street photographer and a wanderer, without preconceptions. I try to leave it extremely intuitive and exploratory.
One of the first times I went to Paris as a photographer, I just looked around and I looked over there and I saw that there is Doisneau, there is Brassaï, there is Kertész, and there is Cartier-Bresson. I just thought, “What am I going to do with my camera?”
Ultimately, the reward is the process—the process of photographing and discovering and trying to understand why and what am I photographing.
There is always a certain kind of tension that exists between the way I see, and what exists in front of me. I think most photography falls in that area, between the photographer’s eye or the photographer’s vision, and the content, the subject matter out there.
I couldn’t work without the world, but I always have a very specific way of seeing it.
