On Alex Webb

Six or seven things at once — the density of the tropics, held together by hard light and harder patience.

Webb photographs complexity without letting it collapse into noise. A single frame might carry three separate events, stitched together by a shadow and the accident of where he stood.

Midday, hard light doing the composing

He works the border and the Caribbean, where the sun is unforgiving and the colour is loud, and he waits — sometimes for hours — for the layers to line up.

A doorway inside a doorway
The street, three stories deep

Standing in the heat

The pictures feel effortless and are the opposite. Each one is a wager that the whole chaotic scene will resolve, for a fraction of a second, into order.

Photography is a matter of standing in the right place, long enough.

A frame with no empty space in it

Shade to sun, and someone crossing
The last of the light