The photographer Alex Webb believes that if you let yourself be open to the idea, you can “smell the possibility of a picture” before it happens. Your body senses an unusual or intriguing set of angles and colour and light and so “you sort of hang out a little bit and then this starts to happen over here and this starts to happen over here”, and an image resolves itself. He took this photograph travelling in Mumbai in 1981. “I wandered incessantly, trying to make visual sense of this complicated and often confounding culture,” he recalls. “Walking one morning, I glimpsed a pair of enormous eyes across the street. As I raised the camera to my eye, a child emerged from the shadows. I clicked the shutter.”
That chance encounter, included in a sale of prints from the Magnum agency this week, was a pivotal image for Webb. Having worked exclusively in black and white as a young photographer, he had been experimenting with colour since travelling to Haiti and along the US border with Mexico in the late 1970s. The “grey-brown reticence” of his New England childhood didn’t begin to seem adequate for the intense colour and piercing light he had found there. His trip to India confirmed that belief.
This picture was used as the cover for Webb’s glorious book The Suffering of Light. The title was derived from a quote from Goethe, “Colours are the deeds and suffering of light”, an expression of the poet’s – and Webb’s – sense that colour emerges from the emotional standoff between light and darkness. Look hard into the two sets of eyes in this picture, those of the hangings and those of the child, or into the blackness of the shadows against the painterly spectrum of clothing, and you might begin to see what they mean.
The Magnum Square Print Sale, to celebrate the co-operative’s 75th anniversary, will take place from 1pm GMT Monday 14 March to 7am GMT Monday 21 March. Magnum photographers are donating 50% of proceeds from the sale to the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)