Alex Webb
[Photographer, b. 1952, San Francisco, lives in Brooklyn, New York.]
I couldn’t work without the world, but I always have a very specific way of seeing it.
The viewer is yet another eye that is part of the compact that makes a photograph what it is.
I only know how to approach a place by walking. For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner.
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?”
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.
