posted on 03 Dec 2017

I See A City: Todd Webb’s New York edited by Betsy Evans Hunt and with essays by Sean Corcoran and Daniel Okrent

This is one of those truly stunning photographic collections that art publishers, Thames and Hudson, do so very well. From the design of the jacket and the end papers that are instantly arresting ( take a bow Beth Tondreau in New York) to the superb lustrous quality of the black and white silver gelatine prints, the book is just a triumph.

Todd Webb came relatively late to photography because he was a little over 40 years old when he left the US navy in 1945 to live in New York and throw himself into his newly adopted identity as a photographer. His choices of subject were the streets, buildings and people of New York and his body of work captures a city that in the late 40s and early 50s was coming to the end of one period of development and about to transform into its next incarnation. Webb has helped to capture a way of life that in a handful of years would be gone forever and he was mentored and helped in this endeavour by the famous photographer, Joseph Steiglitz – whose influence is clear to see.

The dust jacket describes Webb’s project in a colourful way:

Webb photographed the city day and night in all season and in all weather, although not in the systematic way of Berenice Abbott’s ‘Changing New York’, but rather in the spirit of a somewhat down-at-heel flaneur, roaming the city, enthralled by it and its denizens….

I love the notion of a down-at-heel flaneur because that seems to exactly capture the spirit of the photographs which are just as interested in the inanimate objects (buildings, shop fronts, biilboards ) as they are in the people who live in the city.

Webb became a part of the New York art scene and began what would be  a lifelong friendship with the artist, Georgia O’Keefe. When Webb met the socialites Beaumont and Nancy Newhall they were quick to provide him with an introduction to the influential New York photographic circles that included Abbott, Helen Levitt and Gordon Parks. Shunning lucrative magazine and advertising work Webb moved to Paris in 1949, undertook a similar project of street photography and, after four years returned to New York. By the end of the 50s Webb and his wife left for a more tranquil life in New Mexico.

Sean Corcoran, Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York has provided a very useful, readable and mercifully short biographical essay of Webb’s New York years. Really the photographs do all the talking that’s needed.

The subject of the essays, the city of New York, also gets its own essay from Daniel Okrent who is a editor and writer who specialises in the nature and history of New York. This is in itself a fascinating piece of historical and environmental context that gives the photographs their proper showcase.

This is a new publication and so you’re not going to find very cheap copies on line but the fact that the book can be found for well under £30 is a bit of a miracle in its own right given the quality of the production.

I just love books like this. Go on – buy it for yourself as a present.

 

Terry Potter

December 2017