Alex Webb was a 23-year-old photographer in 1976 when he put his belongings in a New York darkroom and headed south in his beat-up Volvo, which doubled as his bedroom. His experiences led his meanderings, and he occasionally picked up assignments that financed his work.
Like many of his projects, “Mound Bayou” began by chance, an initial exploratory trip that later turned into something larger. He had read a short article about the history of Mound Bayou, a Mississippi community that was one of the first incorporated black townships in the United States. Intrigued, he drove into this small town and stopped at Smitty’s Chicken Shack, its lone restaurant, and struck up a conversation with Ellie, a woman of about 30, and two of her children. Ellie invited him back to their house, where he started to photograph. The relationship with that family led to another family, then another.
Although Mr. Webb is best known for his color work, Mound Bayou is the one early black-and-white project he regrets never completing. Projects in Haiti and on the United States-Mexico border pulled him away before he finished his work in the Mississippi Delta. He and James Estrin discussed the project via an email exchange, which has been edited.
What did you find when you arrived?
I found an isolated small town — a few stores, Smitty’s Chicken Shack and a pool hall — on Route 61, also called “The Blues Highway,” which snakes through the Mississippi Delta. Most of the residents of Mound Bayou lived in little ramshackle houses along the dirt roads branching off Route 61.
How did you work?
I stayed in the nearby town of Cleveland, Miss., at a Holiday Inn. I spent some two weeks photographing in Mound Bayou on that first trip and returned several more times over the next two years — each time for about two weeks — often bringing back pictures to those I had photographed. More often than not, I simply hung out, allowing my relationship with one group of people to lead to others.
How about its history?
Mound Bayou was one of the first incorporated black townships in the country. Founded in 1887 in the Mississippi Delta, it became particularly important as a center for health services in the area, initially because of the Taborian Hospital and later for the Delta Health Center founded by Massachusetts’s Tufts University in the mid-60s. During the civil rights era, the town was considered a kind of sanctuary from the highly segregated surrounding communities. Whereas elsewhere in Mississippi blacks were threatened for registering to vote, in Mound Bayou they were involved in the full civic life of the community.
Had you ever been to Mississippi before? Was it similar to anything you had seen before or different?
It was my first trip to Mississippi. I had photographed in some small towns in Alabama prior to visiting Mound Bayou; however, those towns were segregated — unlike Mound Bayou, there were no black town officials, no black police officers, and if there were black-owned businesses, they were in the black part of town.
Visiting Mound Bayou for the first time, I was completely unprepared for the intensity of the emotional experience of being welcomed and embraced by a culture so different than my own. I recall one moment when Ellie, the woman whom I first met at Smitty’s, suddenly turned to me, reached up and put her two hands on either side of my head and said, “I ain’t never touched the hair of a white man before.” Needless to say, as a young, white kid from Cambridge, Mass., I was stunned and deeply moved.
Looking back, how did your background, and race, come into play in the relationships that you developed and the resulting photographs?
I suspect that thanks to the presence of the Tufts Delta Health Center — and perhaps also past civil rights workers, some of whom were white — the people of Mound Bayou were very open to my photographing. I think that my youth played a big role in my being accepted by the community, too.
What did you learn from the experience?
I experienced a rural world far removed from my own — far from either my New England upbringing in a family of artists or the edgy, crime-ridden urban world of New York in the mid-’70s where I moved in 1974. I was deeply moved by the emotional tenor of life in the Delta and by how the community took me in.
Have you been back since?
I briefly passed through Mound Bayou about 12 years ago. What I found was a Mound Bayou that had become even more isolated because Route 61 now bypassed the town. Smitty’s was still thriving, but I didn’t see as many people hanging out in Mound Bayou. Life seemed to be lived more inside — often in front of a television set.
Unfortunately, on that trip I was between other projects and didn’t have much time to photograph. But I hope to return to the Mississippi Delta and Mound Bayou in the future, perhaps to add another chapter to this project.
Soon after this story you started shooting color. What brought that on?
I began working in color largely as result of working more and more in the Caribbean and along the U.S.-Mexico Border, places where intense vibrant color seems somehow embedded in the culture. Looking at my black-and-white photographs then, I felt that I simply wasn’t dealing with an essential element integral to these places.
How is it different photographing in black-and-white and photographing in color?
With color I learned to look at the quality of light in a whole different way. I learned to see and feel not just the angle and intensity of light, but the color of light as well. I learned to experience color not just as color, but as emotion.
Showcase
Alex & Rebecca Norris Webb
Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb, husband and wife and both photographers, have appeared on Lens.
On your current project in Rochester with your wife, Rebecca Norris Webb, you are making black-and-white photographs again. After almost 35 years of shooting color almost exclusively, and being, let’s say, more mature than when you were in Mound Bayou, how are the new images different from your earlier work?
The black-and-white work from Rochester reflects a very specific notion, tied to the demise of Kodak and the fading days of film. For this book, I used some of my last rolls of Kodachrome — the positive color film that I used exclusively for some 30 years — as a kind of nod to my long relationship with this Kodak film. These days, Kodachrome can only be processed as black-and-white. It comes out slightly distressed, almost weathered-looking, like a fading memory. Alongside the color photographs in Memory City — my digital color and Rebecca’s negative color film — the black-and-white photographs look as if they might have been taken at an earlier time. So in this instance, I was using black-and-white as a purposeful counterpoint to the color, trying to suggest something about memory, time and the city itself in the year following Kodak’s announced bankruptcy early in 2012, during what may very well be the last days of film as we know it.
You’re a part of an exhibit at the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago that features your early black-and-white photographs along with those of Lynne Cohen, Martin Parr and Stephen Shore. What is the show about?
The thesis of the show is fairly simple: showing the early black-and-white work of four photographers before they turned to color.
It’s an interesting idea for a show. While I am familiar with Lynne Cohen’s remarkable black-and-white work, I had not seen much of Martin Parr’s black-and-white from the 1980s, rather gentle work that I like very much. And the Stephen Shore diptych in the exhibition is unlike anything of his I have seen before. It’s intriguing to see what these photographers did before they discovered color.
For myself, putting pictures on the wall that I had taken nearly 40 years ago has made wonder just who I was back then — both as a photographer and a human being. Looking at this work again, I also wonder if I shouldn’t spend time looking at all my early black-and-white work — not just from Mound Bayou, but from elsewhere in the American South, from Haiti, Jamaica, the U.S.-Mexico border, and my earliest work in New England — to see if there’s a possible book of this early work.
Looking at one’s photographs is always an education — a way of trying to understand not just the world, but oneself.
Some of Alex Webb’s early black-and-white work, along with that of Martin Parr, Lynne Cohen and Stephen Shore, remains on view at the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago through Feb. 22.
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