Todd Webb

Todd Webb (September 5, 1905 – April 15, 2000) was an American photographer notable for documenting everyday life and architecture in cities such as New York City, Paris as well as from the American west. He traveled extensively during his long life and had important friendships with artists such as Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Harry Callahan.
Early life
Webb was born in Detroit, United States, in 1905 and grew up there and in a Quaker community in Ontario. From 1924 to 1929 he worked as a bank teller and clerk at a brokerage firm in Detroit; in another account, he was a successful stockbroker during the 1920s but lost his earnings during the Crash before the Depression. During the Depression beginning in 1929, he moved to California and worked as a prospector and earned a meager living. During these years he also worked as a fire ranger for the United States Forestry Service. Webb reportedly wrote short stories which were unpublished. After 1934, Webb returned to Detroit and worked for the automobile manufacturer Chrysler in their export division. In 1937, he visited a friend in Panama in search of gold, but had little success. But in Panama, he brought along a camera donated by his former employer, Chrysler.
Career
Early career
Webb returned to Detroit and studied at the Detroit Camera Club. He met photographer Harry Callahan. In 1940, he completed a ten‑day workshop with Ansel Adams as his teacher. In 1941, he visited Rocky Mountain State Park with Harry Callahan, and realized during this trip that he was drawn more to the urban cityscape, and although he found Adams to be an inspiration, he would not make photographs like his teacher. During World War II, Webb was a photographer for the United States Navy and was deployed to the South Pacific theater of operations.
New York City years
After World War II, in 1945, Webb moved to New York City and began his career as a professional photographer. He made key friendships with Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe as well as Beaumont Newhall, Berenice Abbott, Helen Levitt, and Minor White. Webb began a remarkable project of walking the streets of New York City with his heavy camera and tripod and photographing people and buildings he encountered. What set these photos apart was their "straightforward, descriptive clarity" even though they were often of familiar views. One large 10-foot–long panorama photograph which was critically acclaimed showed a section of Sixth Avenue from 43rd–44th streets which, in 1991, was seen as a "visual time capsule of the city" and was described as a "stunner." Webb's photos reflected the photographer's sense of discovery and captured the times, such as photos of hand-painted banners over apartment house doors saying "Welcome Home, G.I.s". In one photograph, Webb went to the top of the RCA Building and shot south using a backlit technique, which captured the Empire State Building at night. The best photographs, according to New York Times art critic Charles Hagen, contained the "simple geometries of urban architecture" in a "simple elegance"; Hagen thought Webb's New York City photographs were his best. In 1946, he had his first solo exhibition of his photographs at the Museum of the City of New York.
In 1947, Webb was hired by Fortune magazine and he worked with professional photographers funded by the Standard Oil Company led by Roy Stryker and the group included notable photographers such as Sol Libsohn. According to the New York Times, the team of professional photographers was "given amazingly free rein by its corporate sponsor" to produce a documentary about oil. One of these photographs, Webb's Pittsburgh Panorama (ca. 1950) shows a grim industrial view towards Pittsburgh from a hill near Westinghouse Bridge that takes in a bare river valley across which snake highways and railways and a row of tall smokestacks in the distance. Curator Edward Steichen selected it for the 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors on its world tour. However, in his memoir, Webb records his disappointment with the way images were "over-enlarged to billboard size" losing "all the qualities that make photographs unique."
Webb traveled to Paris, France, in 1949 and married fellow American Lucille Minqueau. In Paris, Webb produced a "vivid record" of the city which earned him recognition. Then, Webbs moved back to New York City to live in Greenwich Village in 1952.
1955-1956, walking across America
In 1955, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to photographically record pioneer trails of early settlers of the western United States. During that year he walked from New York City to San Francisco.
1957-58, United Nations and Africa
Webb was hired in 1957 by the United Nations to photograph its General Assembly. He won a contract to photograph Sub–Saharan Africa in 1958. Over the course of six months, he photographed extensively in Ghana, Sudan, Togo, Somalia, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. These rich color images were published in 2021 as a book to compliment the exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art titled Todd Webb in Africa, Outside the Frame.
O'Keeffe years
The Webbs moved to Santa Fe in New Mexico around 1961. Webb's photos of his friend Georgia O'Keeffe suggested not only a "loner, severe figure and self-made person" but that there was an "intense connection" between Webb and O'Keeffe. While O'Keeffe was known to have a "prickly personality", Webb's photographs portray her with a kind of "quietness and calm" suggesting a relaxed friendship, and revealing new contours of O'Keeffe's character. Webb's landscape photographs as well as photos of the artist walking among the sagebrush bring O'Keeffe to life "even in pictures where she doesn't appear", according to Chicago Tribune art critic Abigail Foerstner. His photos suggest an "ageless spirit" which was "weathered and indomitable" like desert rock formations. These photos were done using matte finish paper and appear in a book entitled Georgia O'Keeffe: The Artist's Landscape.
Later years
The Webbs lived in the Provence region of France, around 1970, and he continued to photograph regularly, and later lived, for a period, in Bath, England. The Webbs finally settled in the state of Maine, living in the city of Portland, based on the suggestion of a friend. In 1978, Webb won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and continued to live and work in Maine. Webb died in 2000 in Lewiston, Maine.
Legacy
Todd Webb's photographs have been displayed in 25 major museum collections including the MOMA in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Webb's photographic archive is located in Portland, Maine, where reproduction rights and sales of his prints are managed.
In 2006, the Hallmark Greeting Cards Corporation acquired at least 161 of Webb's photographs, and in 2006 decided to give them away in a generous donation to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City.
In 2017, the Todd Webb Archive refurbished its website with biographical data, collection information, and a column regarding news events.
In April 2017, an exhibition titled "A City Seen" opened at the Museum of the City of New York. Curated by Sean Corcoran, the exhibit was a comprehensive survey of Webb's work in New York during the 1940s. The book I See a City: Todd Webb's New York (Thames & Hudson, 2017) was published in conjunction with the exhibition.
Webb's estate is managed by Betsy Evans Hunt who serves as the Executive Director of the Todd Webb Archive.
Awards
Webb was awarded the following:
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1955 & 1956
National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1978
Publications
The following publications relate to Todd Webb:
Gold Strikes and Ghost Towns, Doubleday Press, 1961
The Gold Rush Trails and The Road To Oregon, Doubleday Press, 1963
Nineteenth Century Texas Homes, University of Texas Press, 1966
Todd Webb/Photographs, The Amon Carter Museum
Georgia O'Keeffe, The Artist's Landscape, Twelve Trees Press, 1984
Todd Webb: Photographs of New York and Paris, Hallmark Cards, 1996
Looking Back; Memoirs and Photographs, University of New Mexico, 1991
Todd Webb: New York, 1946, 21st Editions, 2015
I See a City: Todd Webb's New York, Thames & Hudson, 2017
Todd Webb in Africa, Outside the Frame, Thames & Hudson, 2021
Collections
Webb's work is in the following collections:
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio
Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania
The American Embassy, Paris, France
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, France
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Massachusetts
Carnegie Museum, University of Maine at Orono, Orono, Maine
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona
Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois
Colby College Art Museum, Waterville, Maine
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California
Graham Nash Collection, Los Angeles, California
Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
Historic New Orleans Collection & Archives of American Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
Institute of Art, Detroit, Michigan
The International Center of Photography, New York City
Judy and Leonard Lauder Collection, New York City
Lehigh University Art Gallery, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, Vermont
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Museum of Fine Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York City
Museum of the City of New York, New York City
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
The National Museum, Tokyo, Japan
The National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
New York Public Library, New York
Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
The Painting Gallery, Munich, Germany
Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine
Rice University, Houston, Texas
Rochester Institute of Art, Rochester, New York
Royal Photographic Society, London, England
San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
Smith College Art Museum, Northampton, Massachusetts
The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, Massachusetts
References
External links
Official Todd Webb website
Todd Webb on Art Encyclopedia
Todd Webb Archive
1905 births
2000 deaths
20th-century American photographers
United States Navy sailors
American war photographers
Artists from Detroit
Artists from Portland, Maine
Photographers from New York City