Looking Back: Memoirs and Photographs

Born in 1905, Todd Webb began keeping a journal in 1946, the same year he moved to New York and took up photography in earnest. He became a close friend to Alfred Stieglitz, who admired his photographs and gave him much encouragement. These memoirs document not only Webb's struggles as a young photographer, but also the heady atmosphere of New York in the forties and fifties. Webb's friendships with Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Harry Callahan, Helen Levitt, Minor White, Berenice Abbott, and Lisette Model are recounted in intimate, often humorous detail. Webb writes with refreshing candor about himself, his times, and his photographs to provide a rich portrait of a remarkable career in photography. This book, lavishly illustrated throughout, is a fresh firsthand view of one man's life and work as well as of a vital time in American photography. No one else could have told Todd Webb's story as well as he has told it himself. Anyone interested in postwar American photography will want to own this book.