Violet Isle, color photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, was published in 2009 by Radius books, a distinctive new not-for-profit publisher of books of “artistic and cultural value.” Texts are in Spanish and English. Two Looks is by the Webbs about their collaboration and The Sunlight in Shade, The Stillness in Motion is a prescient after word by Pico Iyer. The book is soft cover, slip cased, and in an edition of 2,000 copies.

Violet Isle was launched at the opening of an exhibition of the photographs at Ricco Maresca Gallery in Manhattan in November. But the contrast between the photographs on display (now on the gallery website) and the photographs appearing in this book is shocking, because most of the photographs are insistently “guttered.” This aggressive design usually strikes me as designer-ego gone astray, a designer who wants to be co-creator with the author. But I notice the poster mailed out announcing the show also reflected a total reformatting of some of the photos in the show, and I really liked that. So, after about a month, after my loathing of the design subsided and the book flattened easily with no signs of damage, I spent more and more time with the book and embrace it now as bookwork, photobookwork, production, not merely reproduction. As such it is the wonderful collaboration between two quite different but related photographers, and Radius.




Alex Webb considers this his best book since his first, Hot Light: Half Made Worlds, 1986, a 20thCentury classic, as distinctive now as it was then. Rebecca Norris Webb continues with her unique take on the world of “our” animals, that is, our animals and us, an ongoing project first published in her haunting, lyrical bookwork The Glass Between Us, 2006. Her photographs are of psychological spaces as much as “real places,” frequently strange, sometimes absurd, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. But caution, laugh at your own peril. The stunning cover image is hers.



Alex’s photographs put black into the vocabulary of color photography and added the Amazon, Haiti, Istanbul, and now, after 11 trips, Cuba, to our mental landscape. He shows us brilliantly the patchwork that reality really is, a pieced together kind of multi-layered crazy quilt affair, postmodern pastiche in your face. (Only Raguhbir Singh has produced a country so vividly for us.) Like the other great Magnum photographers, he turns Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” into absolutely real and magical frozen moments of fluid, dynamic visual flux, and he does it in almost “scalding” color. The design only heightens the sense of the reality of photography as collage, and montage, and the book, a photomontage…paper cinema.



The combination of the two bodies of work is a seamless duet, improved by design, and greater than either. It is being--in--Cuba. You feel the place. This is quite different from all of the many other books that show us aspects of the place in piecemeal collections. This is the Violet Isle, a beautiful strange place adrift in time, where we see the wreckage of the dreams of socialist utopia as much as the dreams of empires, and a prison in time where millions of people live and die, 90 miles from our shores, a short boat ride away, and yet as far away as the Cuban missile crisis, the bay of pigs, and cold war era politics that almost ended the world as we know it. —Alex Sweetman