Quotes by
Alex Webb

I photographed numbly, producing photographs too obscene to show the world but too important to ignore. How, I later wondered, could a viewer looking at those dismemberments ever step beyond disgust and horror and understand that there could be complicated motives for such brutality?.

Color is very much about atmosphere and emotion and the feel of a place.

Whether I’m photographing near or far from where I live, I try to embrace a sense of discovery.

I hope to bring back pictures from the world that open people's eyes—pictures that suggest the enigmatic nature of the world we live in, as well as its variety, complexity, beauty, and pain.

It's not for me to tell viewers what to find in my photographs; it's for them to discover. I believe that viewers, depending on who they are— their culture, their education, their unique personality— will each find something different in the photographs.

I believe in photographs that convey a certain level of ambiguity, that ask questions rather than provide answers.

..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 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.

Running through a lot of traditional photojournalism there is an overwhelming sense of... pictures that say something, that define something. I’m not trying to define things. I’m trying to explore things. I’m trying to ask questions.

There is something about the light, the heat (physical and perhaps metaphysical), the vibrancy of street life, and the rawness and disjointedness of much of the tropical world that has moved and disturbed me—in places where the indigenous culture is often transformed by an external northern culture (sometimes my own... I suspect that one has a few serious creative obsessions in life. I certainly cannot seem to escape this one.

The viewer is yet another eye that is part of the compact that makes a photograph what it is.

Sometimes not taking a photograph can be as problematic as taking one.

When you hit that wall of utter frustration while photographing in the street, when you are beyond tired and just want to give up, keep on walking — for another hour, or until the light goes entirely. Often the best photographs come when you least expect them — when you are the most exhausted, and the most emotionally vulnerable.

Street photography is 99.9 percent about failure. So often I feel defeated by the street. I sometimes find, however, that if I keep walking, keep looking, and keep pushing myself, eventually something interesting will happen.
Every once in a while, at the end of the day, when I’m most exhausted and hungry, something—a shaft of light, an unexpected gesture, an odd juxtaposition— suddenly reveals a photograph. It’s almost as if I had to go through all those hours of frustration and failure in order to get to the place where I could finally see that singular moment at day’s end.

Photograph because you love doing it, because you absolutely have to do it, because the chief reward is going to be the process of doing it. Other rewards — recognition, financial remuneration — come to so few and are so fleeting. And even if you are somewhat successful, there will almost inevitably be stretches of time when you will be ignored, have little income, or — often — both. Certainly there are many other easier ways to make a living in this society. Take photography on as a passion, not a career.

Street photography is 99.9 percent about failure. So often I feel defeated by the street. I sometimes find, however, that if I keep walking, keep looking, and keep pushing myself, eventually something interesting will happen. Every once in a while, at the end of the day, when I’m most exhausted and hungry, something—a shaft of light, an unexpected gesture, an odd juxtaposition— suddenly reveals a photograph. It’s almost as if I had to go through all those hours of frustration and failure in order to get to the place where I could finally see that singular moment at day’s end.

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.

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.

I feel the space, the light, the colour, the form and the scene simultaneously. I'm not thinking, I'm sensing the street… I'm intrigued with the emotional and sensory tenor of these elements.

Time is often the best editor. How you perceive your work the day after you photograph is very different from a week later, and significantly different from three weeks later— or three months. Time helps get rid of sentimental attachments to a photograph: "I really liked this person I photographed so the picture must be good" or "I worked very hard on this picture so it must be successful." Time gives you the distance necessary to see the work more clearly.

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.

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.

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.

Ultimately, the reward is the process—the process of photographing and discovering and trying to understand why and what am I photographing.

I couldn’t work without the world, but I always have a very specific way of seeing it.

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?"

Street photography is 99.9 per cent about failure.

I didn't get truly excited about photography until my sophomore year of high school (although I actually learned photographic technique from my father much earlier). I had played around with making little (extremely bad) movies, using friends and family as actors, and rapidly realized that I did not want to work with lots of other people. I wanted to work alone. I began photographing in the streets of Brattleboro, Vermont, near the school that I attended, and in Boston, where my family lived. I discovered photographing in the street. I've been doing it ever since.

I'm always playing along that line: adding something more, yet keeping it sort of chaos.

Take the pictures you believe in. The rewards in photography are so fleeting, so unpredictable, often so negligible, that the only true fulfilment comes from creation.