For their second collaborative photographic book, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, are exploring the legendary city of Rochester, home of Eastman Kodak Company for 125 years. Published by Radius Books, Memory City, is an elegy to the city’s past and contemporary history. It’s also a tribute to Kodachrome, the now discontinued color film, which Alex Webb has been using for 30 years along with many other photographers.
After the bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak in 2012, both photographers have been travelling back and forth to Rochester for a year, trying to capture the social landscape of the city—its economic, social, racial desolation—as well as the richness of its cultural history and the life of its residents. Memory City is also a book where two photographic visions complement each other, between street photography and poetry.
L’Oeil de la Photographie: How did you decide to work on Rochester? How this city resonates in your photographic work and your personal history?
Alex Webb (AW): This project grew out of a two-week Magnum group project on Rochester, NY, that I was asked to be part of in April 2012, three months after Kodak declared Chapter 11. I invited Rebecca to come along with me, and we quickly became fascinated with this troubled yet soulful home of Kodak—and the city’s rich history.
Kodachrome, produced for many years in Rochester, was an essential part of my photographic process for more than 30 years. As a young photographer, I discovered a way of working in the intense light and vibrant colors of the tropics using Kodachrome, Kodak’s first significant mass-market color film. That’s why I decided to use my last rolls of Kodachrome, the now discontinued vibrant color film that can now only be processed as black and white, which lends it a weathered feel, as if faded over time.
Rebecca Norris Webb (RNW): I, too, found my way of seeing by using a particular Kodak film, first TriX and then later Portra. And since I solely use film, that flimsy slip of celluloid brought to mind the metaphor of women’s special occasion dresses, worn only once to a memorable event. So Memory City’s still lifes and portraits of Rochester women past and present became Memory City’s elegiac refrain, my way of memorializing film, my long relationship with it, and the city itself.
Was it obvious from the beginning that it would be a collaborative project?
AW: Unlike our Cuba book, Violet Isle, which started as two separate individual projects, we conceived Memory City from the beginning as a joint project. While that may have given our initial forays into Rochester a kind of coherence, it also made us highly cognizant of the differences between our rhythms of working.
RNW: Yes, Alex tends to dive into a project, and I tend to wade in rather slowly…
L’O: How are you working together? Did you visit Rochester at the same time from 2012 to 2013?
AW: We visited Rochester together, making 5 trips from April 2012 through April 2013. However, we almost never actually photographed together. Our usual way of working was to go our separate ways each morning, usually meeting up at the end of the day for dinner. But there are a few exceptions to this. Twice while working on Memory City we ended up photographing the same situation—including the Day of Remembrance, an event memorializing the slaves who died in the Middle Passage crossing the Atlantic from Africa. However, the photographs are so utterly different, it is a bit surprising that they came out of the same event.
RNW: As a creative couple, we learned early on that having two photographers working in the street can radically alter the dynamic of photographing. So when we occasionally photograph the same event, we tend to work along different edges.
“The City” has been an important topic in the history of photography and the history of the photographic book. This subject matter has been mostly taken over by documentary and social photography. I’m thinking of Dorchester Days by Eugene Richards or Pittsburgh by William Eugene Smith. Are cities a photographic topic you are interested in usually?
AW: At heart, I am a street photographer, so cities have been essential to my work. Two of my books, Istanbul and Memory City, deal solely with one city. And other cities — Port-au-Prince for Under A Grudging Sun, Tijuana for Crossings, Miami for From the Sunshine State—have been essential components of other books. Cities are where I am most at home photographing.
RNW: “The City” has long been an important topic in literature as well, which is why Memory City starts with a quote from one of our favorite novels about cities, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. We loved the challenge of trying to suggest with images and text the various layers of Rochester—socially, historically, architecturally, politically, environmentally, and poetically. Originally a poet, I found my way into Rochester by reading the work of several poets who once called Rochester home, including Ilya Kaminsky’s wonderfully resonant line: “Time, my twin, take me by the hand through the streets of your city.”
Your book succeeds to mix street photography with poetic images. Would you say that you were trying to depict “the city” as a social landscape as well as an epic and lyrical place?
AW: It was certainly a challenge to try to suggest the complicated city that Rochester is today: a lyrical and soulful place, an economically and somewhat racially troubled city (reflecting some of the racial divisions that bedevil many U.S. cities.) But we were also trying to explore Rochester on a metaphorical level, trying through our respective nods to the filmic tradition (my Kodachrome processed as black and white, Rebecca’s contact sheets and her photographs of dresses and young women), to evoke something about Rochester’s rich cultural history and its relationship—as well as our relationship—with the photographic medium.
Besides, none other city has been bound to the photographic industry as Rochester. The bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak marks also the decline of industries in United States’ cities. Were you interested in this issue? Were you trying to record the traces of this glorious past? Would you say that your photographs of Rochester are recording the presence of an absence?
AW: Yes, I think that Rochester’s decline has parallels with other cities across the Midwest—one-time steel cities like Youngstown or car-producing cities like Detroit. The question facing such cities is how will they re-invent themselves. (Akron, for example, once a tire capital, successfully expanded into polymers.)
RNW: I still use film, so it made sense to photograph Rochester with my favorite Kodak film, Portra. That said, surprisingly I couldn’t always find the film while working in Rochester—Kodak’s international headquarters—and so reluctantly sometimes substituted another company’s film. Hence, the city’s limited supplies of Portra became part of the project, my way of documenting absence.
For Memory City, I also ended up using a variety of images—landscapes, portraits, and still lifes —and perhaps because I often use a shallow depth of field, some of these images have the feel of a cinematic close up, a device I’ve long been drawn to because of the mesmerizing way it seems to slow down time. Additionally, I also photographed reflections, in which foreground and background—and their temporal equivalents of present and past—seem to overlap and blur, evoking the mindset one experiences while drifting from the here-and-now into memory.
Through your book, you are giving two different points of view, two specific photographic visions on one city. Would you say that it helps to make Rochester and its history more complex and vivid?
AW: With a project as layered and as complicated as this one, in which we are trying to depict a living, ongoing city as well as to evoke something deep and fundamental about its past, I think that having two photographic visions enriches the book, enabling us to explore more different layers of this complex city.
RNW: Memory City was the most difficult book we’ve ever sequenced, and it took as long to edit the book—one year—as it did to photograph it. We were pretty lost initially, until we realized that Alex’s black and white images—perhaps because they are distressed and weathered feeling—resonate with the past. We started to play with this idea of how the mind contemplates time. For instance, one moment you’re enmeshed in the here-and-now, and then something tugs at you and suddenly you’re drifting into some memory, suggested by Alex’s evocative black and white Kodachromes. A moment later, you find yourself slipping into a reverie about the future, hinted at by those dreamy portraits of young women—such as New Mother Brienna— who seemingly have their entire lives ahead of them.
Alex, you have been working with Kodachrome for 30 years. How did you come to use this kind of film? How did Kodak help you to find your own individual way in photography?
AW: In the late seventies, while still working in black and white, I found myself drawn more and more to—loosely speaking—“the tropics,” in particular Haiti and along the US-Mexico border. But as I worked more, I realized that something was missing, I wasn’t capturing the sense of intense light and vibrant color that permeates these places, places where somehow vivid color seems almost embedded in the culture, very different from the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. I turned to Kodachrome, which, with its rich blacks and deep reds, seemed ideally suited for my response to the intense light and vibrant color of these worlds. As my sense of color expanded, and as I pushed beyond the tropics into other worlds (Istanbul, for example), Kodachrome, with its punchy emotionality, remained my film of choice.
Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, the disappearing of Eastman Kodak and the industry of films is also changing the practice of photography. How did it affect your work?
AW: With the demise of Kodachrome, I was in a quandary: what could possibly replace this film that was so essential to my way of seeing? Though there are now very good color negative films, much better ones than when I began working in color 35 years ago, I was concerned that as soon as I found one I liked, it would be discontinued. Also, as a working photographer, I had to learn to work digitally if I wanted to continue to work for the few magazines that are still around. And I didn’t want the schizophrenia of working digitally for clients and with film for myself. So I reluctantly began working digitally. Finally, after some years of experimentation and frustration, I am finally getting a quality out of digital work that I like. It’s not the same as film—and I accept that—but I am okay with it. (It’s a bit like the difference between vinyl records and CD’s…) And sometimes there are kinds of images that I can take now digitally that I would not have been able to take with Kodachrome.
RNW: For me, Memory City became a kind of “Farewell to Film,” as I call my chapter of “Notes on Film and Memory,” the visual afterword that’s a separate booklet tucked in the back of the book, another nod to all things analogue by the book’s designer David Chickey, Creative Director of Radius Books. Here’s an excerpt from this “Unfinished Manuscript”:
Is it the waiting I’ll miss most of all?
Film insists on this: Time becomes a collaborator.
What happens to the image in the back of my mind while I’m waiting for its unidentical twin—the image on the piece of film—to be developed?
I sleep on it. I forget. I dismiss. I anguish. I misremember. I relinquish.
Is it the waiting I’ll miss most of all?
L’O: This book gives a large presence to literature. The incipit is by Italo Calvino and you include citations all along the book. How did you link in your own work and more specifically in this book literature and photography? Was literature a way to create an exchange of questions and answers between the words of Rochester’s residents and your photographs?
AW: Most photographers have had moments early on in their lives when they could have chosen another path that led to something else besides photography. I had such a moment in college when I fantasized that I might become a novelist. So novelistic notions recur in my work. My first trip to Haiti, for example, was partially inspired by reading Graham Green’s The Comedians, a novel set in that country. I suspect that the structure of my first book, Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds, was influenced by that of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—that sense of city as palimpsest—became a key influence for Memory City.
RNW: For me, I think in images—whether I happen to have a camera in my hands or a pencil. I think the Nebraska writer and photographer Wright Morris said it best: “I don’t give up the camera eye when I write, merely the camera.” So I think of poetry and photography as sister arts, since both often deal with time, elusive moments, and indelible memories, the latter which come into our lives often mysteriously: “stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit, and simply never leave. Our lives our measure by these,” to quote noted Rochester resident and women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony.
In this book you are using different ways of presenting your photographs from contact filmstrip to double-page spread photographs to fold leaves. Are the leaves working as layers that unveil Rochester’s secrets? Are they a reference to literature as well?
AW: The tipped-in pictures as well as the timeline at the back of the book are indeed supposed to evoke the notion of the unfolding of time or the unfolding of history, as well as being a nod to an older way of making books. One of the remarkable things about working with the designer David Chickey is how he gets inside the concept of a book, and how his design reflects the notions and illuminates the ideas of the book.
Rebecca Norris Webb, your work adds a strong abstract poetry quality to the book and you also chose to focus on women of Rochester. Some are historical figures as Susan B. Anthony, others are unknown women. Why did you choose to focus on these figures? Was it also a way to link past with present in this city through individuals’ marks?
RNW: I became fascinated with the lives of noted Rochester women—like Susan B. Anthony—but even more so by those ordinary women that history tends to ignore. For instance, Alex’s and my assistant, Amanda Webster, ended up becoming an integral part of the book because her family epitomizes the changes in Rochester’s past three generation: Amanda’s grandfather and father worked for Kodak and she’s studying photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, that was funded in part by George Eastman, Kodak’s founder. I ended up photographing three of Amanda’s dresses for Memory City: her christening gown, her flower girl dress, and her mother’s wedding dress that’s been saved for 25 years for Amanda.
And through Amanda, I met and photographed a variety of her friends and acquaintances, young Rochester women whose dreamy portraits suggest something about the city’s uncertain future, including Maimouna, a recent immigrant and college student wearing a traditional dress she’d brought from her homeland, Guinea, in Rochester’s 7th Ward neighborhood.
BOOK
Memory City
Santa Fe: Radius Books
2014
Hardbound with separate booklet in a back pocket
9.75 x 12.25 inches
172 pages
65 color and B/W images
Alex and Rebecca’s Website: www.webbnorriswebb.co
Alex and Rebecca’s Two Looks blog: webbnorriswebb.wordpress.com
