Street photographers are taught to simplify. Find a clearly identified subject, moment or scene amidst the chaos of city life. Focus in on it, and minimise the visual clutter. Wait for the decisive moment, then pull the trigger. Alex Webb, though, does the opposite.
His images are dense and layered. There's no obvious focal point, which prompts you to keep looking at every nook and cranny. Take the photograph above, for example. There's no obvious theme.
There's a smiling woman in a brown hat… or is she grimacing? Meanwhile, a man in a flat cap, stares into the middle distance, enveloped by the reflection of a huge black-and-white face from an advertising poster. And that's just on the left-hand side of the picture. On the right, a mural explodes with color: a man in a red coat crosses the street and another strides out of the frame.
Overall, some of these people are behind the glass, some in front of it, some reflected in it. It's visual chaos. It's also what cities actually look like.
This is the cover image for Alex Webb’s new book Walking Blues, published by Aperture. Over more than a decade, Webb travelled to some 40 cities across the US, from Erie to El Paso and Atlanta to Oakland, and shot what the press materials call: “moments of connection between communities”.
Busy scenes
Webb has been one of the great names in street photography for decades. Born in San Francisco in 1952, he became a full member of Magnum in 1979 and has since published more than 20 books, including The Suffering of Light (2011) and La Calle: Photographs from Mexico (2016). He's known for his use of saturated color and love of busy frames, packed with several things happening at once.
Take this shot from 2010. In a park in Erie, Pennsylvania, a rainbow arcs through the spray of a sprinkler, dividing the frame neatly into two. On one side, one child stands with arms raised; on the other, a second lies flat on the ground. In the background, a man sits on a bench and watches. Nothing dramatic is happening, yet everything is. It's a shot that evokes joy, stillness and the sense of an older generation looking on at the youth.
These types of picture might look spontaneous, but in practice they demand huge patience. In street photography, it's rare for all the elements to line up like this. To capture such a moment, you have to walk, wait and fail an awful lot.
Why Walking Blues? According to Aperture, Webb was inspired by the “lift and pull” of blues music, and his pictures “express the improvisation of chance encounters”. And it's a metaphor that makes sense to me.
The blues works through repetition and variation: a familiar structure, played again and again, with something new each time. Similarly, in Walking Blues, elements repeat from city to city (a corner, a wall, a slab of shadow, people passing by) but the creativity lies in the improvisation.
Why it's important
This feels like a timely release. Right now, street photography is under pressure as never before, challenged by everything from privacy concerns to legal restrictions to a flood of AI imagery that makes us doubt every image we see.
Walking Blues is a powerful reminder of what we’d lose if this kind of work disappeared. Webb isn't mocking or exploiting his subjects. He's talking pictures of ordinary people living alongside each other. Nobody staged them, and no algorithm could have imagined them.
Alex Webb: Walking Blues is published by Aperture. A related installation of prints will be on view at Aperture, 380 Columbus Avenue, New York, from November 18 to January 10.
