"My response to writer’s block was to buy a small camera and travel for a year, hoping my photographs would spark my poetry when I returned. Instead, I fell in love with photography. I realized that the eye focusing on those images in my poetry was the same eye looking through the lens. I think Wright Morris, the Nebraska writer and photographer, said it best: 'I don’t give up the camera eye when I write, merely the camera.'” - Rebecca Norris Webb
"I’m at heart a bookmaker working in a hybrid personal documentary form that interweaves my photographs and spare text. Bringing the two together, I hope to create a more spacious and expansive form that allows me to explore terrain that falls outside the frame—such as memory, history and reverie." - Rebecca Norris Webb
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. Rebecca is a 2019 NEA grant recipient. Her book, Brooklyn: The City Within (with Alex Webb), published by Aperture in fall 2019, will be exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York thru April 18, 2021. Her eighth book, Night Calls, in which she's retracing the route of some of her 100-year-old country doctor father's house calls through the same rural county where they both were born, was released by Radius in December 2020. Her collaborative book with Alex Webb, Waves, a pandemic logbook in words and images on Cape Cod, will be published by Radius in early 2022.
Born in Rushville, Indiana, Norris Webb graduated from Columbia University's Graduate Schoolof Journalism in 1989.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS:
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Cleveland Museum of Art Pier 24, San Francisco Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, N.D.
Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Mass.
Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, Mass.
Zucchi Museum, Milan, Italy
Fototeca, National Photography Archive, Havana, Cuba
Dahl Arts Center, Rapid City, South Dakota
JGS Collection, New York, NY
Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston, Texas
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa.
Cassilhaus Collection, Durham, North Carolina
