After posting an essay on Alex Webb it is fitting to carry the next post over to Rebecca Norris Webb, who shares the same website as her husband, the couple also work together as a team conducting international workshops and projects.

Rebecca Norris Webb is a renowned photographer and poet in her own right.

Since transferring the poetry to the visual image Norris Webb has published two photographic books, The Glass Between us and Violet Isle and A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (A Collaboration with husband Alex Webb)  Her third photographic book due to be released on May 24 in New York at The International Centre of Photography My Dakota  is a mixture of poetry and photography dedicated to the memory of her brother.

Rebecca states that ‘for the last 10 years, I’ve explored the complicated relationship between people and the natural world, and the underlying tensions- social, philosophical, and emotional- as this fragile bond is strained to the breaking point, which, for many of us may well be, to quote the writer Sebald, “where the sources of pain are.”

This statement rings true of her lastest work My Dakota, strongly personal, Rebecca Norris Webb explores the relationship between place, memory, loss and pain through her own emotional reflection due to the loss of a brother… Being strongly personal, at the same time the work dispassionately explores humanity’s relationship between its sense of existence and fleeting permanence…  reflecting that space where quintessential sentiments and questions are inflicted on us due to an explosion of overbearing emotion that weighs on us and places our human sensibility in contrast with the strong objectivity of the world’s terrain.

Her work brings to mind an excerpt from a poem of T. S Eliot; which seems a natural connection (a link of the poetic, written and visual) when absorbing Rebecca Norris Webb’s photography… her images portray a strong connection with that sensibility which creates the poetic and draws it out of life…

The extraction is from a poem called Little Giddy V by T.S Eliot

we shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
through the unknown, remembered gate
when the last of earth left to discover
is that which was the beginning;
at the source of the longest river
the voice of the hidden waterfall
and the children in the apple tree
not known, because not looked for
but heard, half-heard, in the stillness
between two waves of the sea.
quick now, here, now, always-
a condition of complete simplicity..

(costing not less than everything)…-

The online publication Time Machine in its latest edition published a story about My Dakota and an interesting interview with Rebecca Norris Webb who personally describes the work.

My Dakota will be launched thursday May 24 at The ICP Store from 6- 7:30pm, Rebecca Norris Webb will be signing copies at the event.

Anna Maria Antoinette D’Addario