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 heat of the known awaits just around the corner.

Alex Webb

Categorized in : Waiting Secret Photography

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...Take photography on as a passion, not a career.

passion careers photography

Color is very much about atmosphere and emotion and the feel of a... by Alex Webb

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

atmosphere emotion color

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

rewards process trying

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.

light creative culture

To a certain extent what I do is play with the world, but it's di... by Alex Webb

To a certain extent what I do is play with the world, but it's disciplined play.

certain play world

I'm always playing along that line: adding something more, yet ke... by Alex Webb

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

chaos lines

The viewer is yet another eye that is part of the compact that ma... by Alex Webb

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

compact eye photograph

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.

editors trying ideas

Most of my projects seem to start as exploratory journeys with no... by Alex Webb

Most of my projects seem to start as exploratory journeys with no visible end in sight.

ends journey sight

I mean its an obsession, you follow the obsession but at the same time you have so many doubts, you know. Why am I wasting so much money going back to this place, taking more pictures? What’s the point of it? No one cares about it. I think I care about it but maybe I am deceiving myself.

doubt mean thinking

My understanding – of course, I’m not a philosopher or a scientist – of an aspect of Goethe’s theory of color is that he felt that color came out of tension between light and dark. I think that is very appropriate when you think about the kind of color that I shoot.

light dark thinking

Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different from the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.

emotional color light

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.

photography art fall

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.

photojournalism running trying

... 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.

photography photographer lying

It's not just that that and that exists. It's that that, that, that, and that all exist in the same frame. I'm always looking for something more. You take in too much; perhaps it becomes total chaos. I'm always playing along that line: adding something more, yet keeping it sort of chaos.

chaos lines too-much