About the Workshop

Do you know how to listen to your photographs—including how they talk to one another—in order to select and sequence your work? Learn the art of intuitive editing—selecting and sequencing—your photographs from Magnum photographer Alex Webb and poet and photographer Rebecca Norris Webb, who together and apart, have authored more than 20 books and numerous exhibitions, including Alex’s Dislocations, Rebecca’s hybrid poetry book, A Difficulty Is a Light, and their recent collaborative book of work from Cape Cod, Waves.

This workshop is open to a range of participants—from passionate beginners to professional photographers; from university students to seasoned photographers; from fine art to documentary photographers; as well as other artists who work in hybrid forms that bring together photographs with words, other artwork, or ephemera. The Webbs will begin the workshop by looking at a series of photographs from each workshop participant, which could be from a recent trip you’ve taken or an event (such as a wedding, parade, or festival)—or, for more advanced photographers, perhaps photographs from a long-term project that you hope one day might become an exhibition and/or a book. Each day, the Webbs will tailor an individual selecting and sequencing assignment for each participant.

Participants are welcome to bring other materials to interweave with their photographs—including poems, diary entries, fiction, nonfiction and other text pieces; drawings, paintings, and other art works; and maps, letters, and other ephemera. Besides daily assignments, there will also be a series of presentations and a group editing exercise. There will also be a chance for each participant to have an individual meeting with Alex and Rebecca.

About the Instructors

Alex Webb has published more than fifteen photography books, including The Suffering of Light, a survey book of thirty years of his color photographs. He’s exhibited at museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has been a Magnum Photos member since 1979, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Vogue, and other publications. He has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His most recent books include Dislocations (Aperture, 2023) and the collaborations with Rebecca Norris Webb; Brooklyn: The City Within (Aperture, 2019), exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York; Waves (Radius, 2022), exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association Museum in spring 2024; and their popular Aperture educational book, Alex Webb & Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography & the Poetic Image. He’s currently working on his upcoming Aperture book on U.S. cities, coming out fall 2026.

Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her ten books, most notably in her Radius monograph, My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—for which a solo exhibition of the work appeared at The Cleveland Museum of Art, among other venues. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Le Monde, and The New York Times Magazine, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. A 2019 NEA grant recipient, her most recent body of work is a hybrid poetry book, A Difficulty Is a Light (Chose Commune, 2024), punctuated by fifteen of her photographs, with an accompanying exhibition at the Alessia Paladini Gallery, Milan. Norris Webb is currently working on an ongoing series of photographs in the Dakotas, called Badlands, as well as her upcoming book, Glimmerings, a selection of some thirty years of her lyrical color photographs, which will be released by Radius in Spring 2027.