Stephen Bul­ger Gallery in Toronto presents “The Suf­fer­ing of Light,” a solo exhi­bi­tion by pho­tog­ra­pher Alex Webb, open­ing Thurs­day, Decem­ber 1st.  Lau­mont Stu­dio was pleased to have pro­duced the scans and C-Prints for this exhibit.  The fol­low­ing Thurs­day, Decem­ber 8th, in tan­dem with the show in Toronto, Aper­ture Gallery will launch the New York exhibit to accom­pany the release of Webb’s new book of the same title, pub­lished by Aper­ture, May 2011.

From the Stephen Bul­ger Gallery press release:

“The Suf­fer­ing of Light” is pre­sented in con­junc­tion with the APERTURE release of the mono­graph with the same name. This exhi­bi­tion gath­ers some of Webb’s most iconic images, taken in the far cor­ners of the earth, and chron­i­cles his acute reflec­tions of daily life with his remark­able sense of colour and composition.

Rec­og­nized as a pio­neer of Amer­i­can colour pho­tog­ra­phy since the 1970s, Webb has con­sis­tently cre­ated pho­tographs char­ac­ter­ized by intense colour and light. His work, with its richly lay­ered and com­plex com­po­si­tion, touches on mul­ti­ple gen­res, includ­ing street pho­tog­ra­phy, pho­to­jour­nal­ism, and fine art, but as Webb claims, “to me it all is pho­tog­ra­phy. You have to go out and explore the world with a cam­era.” Webb’s abil­ity to dis­till ges­ture, colour, and con­trast­ing cul­tural ten­sions into sin­gle, beguil­ing frames results in evoca­tive images that con­vey a sense of enigma, irony, and humour. Fea­tur­ing key works along­side pre­vi­ously unpub­lished pho­tographs, “The Suf­fer­ing of Light” pro­vides the most thor­ough exam­i­na­tion to date of this mod­ern master’s pro­lific, thirty-year career.

Alex Webb (b. San Fran­cisco , 1952) became inter­ested in pho­tog­ra­phy dur­ing his high school years and attended the Ape­iron Work­shops in Miller­ton , New York , in 1972. He majored in his­tory and lit­er­a­ture at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity , at the same time study­ing pho­tog­ra­phy at the Car­pen­ter Cen­ter for the Visual Arts. In 1974, he began work­ing as a pro­fes­sional pho­to­jour­nal­ist and he joined Mag­num Pho­tos as an asso­ciate mem­ber in 1976.

Dur­ing the mid-1970s, Webb pho­tographed in the Amer­i­can south, doc­u­ment­ing small-town life in black and white. He also began work­ing in the Caribbean and Mex­ico . In 1978 he started to pho­to­graph in colour, as he has con­tin­ued to do. He has pub­lished nine pho­tog­ra­phy books, includ­ing Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds: Pho­tographs from the Trop­ics, Under A Grudg­ing Sun, Cross­ings, Istan­bul: City of a Hun­dred Names, Vio­let Isle: A Duet of Pho­tographs of Cuba (with Rebecca Nor­ris Webb), and, most recently, The Suf­fer­ing of Light: Thirty Years of Photographs.

Webb received a New York Foun­da­tion of the Arts Grant in 1986, a National Endow­ment for the Arts Fel­low­ship in 1990, a Has­sel­blad Foun­da­tion Grant in 1998 and a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship in 2007. He won the Leopold Godowsky Color Pho­tog­ra­phy Award in 1988, the Leica Medal of Excel­lence in 2000 and the David Octavius Hill Award in 2002. His pho­tographs have been the sub­ject of arti­cles in Art in Amer­ica and Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy. He has exhib­ited widely in the United States and Europe, in muse­ums includ­ing the Walker Art Cen­ter, the Museum of Pho­to­graphic Arts, the Inter­na­tional Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, San Diego, and the Whit­ney Museum of Amer­i­can Art, includ­ing a cur­rent show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Vio­let Isle” (with Rebecca Nor­ris Webb). Webb, a mem­ber of Mag­num Pho­tos since 1976, lives in New York City with pho­tog­ra­pher Rebecca Nor­ris Webb.

Quote: “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.”

The show at Stephen Bul­ger Gallery will run until Jan­u­ary 14th.  Aper­ture Gallery will close their show on Jan­u­ary 19th.