Bookshelf - The Suffering of Light - Alex Webb
- Ian Dawson
- Aug 27
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 31
The first pages of The Suffering of Light opened in my hands like a door into another world—one saturated with colour and alive with tension. “Colour is the very marrow of Alex Webb’s photography,” wrote Geoff Dyer, “the element in which his subjects live and breathe.” That insight is nowhere more evident than in this landmark volume (Thames & Hudson, 2011), the first major retrospective of Webb’s colour work, spanning 1979 to 2010.

Webb’s photographs are saturated with intensity: cobalt and vermilion walls in Mexico, the dusty ochres of Port-au-Prince, the twilight blues of Istanbul. His palette is never passive, never incidental. Colour in these images feels tangible, a physical presence that shapes narrative as much as gesture or expression. Light, too, is not merely illumination but a force—harsh, theatrical, and at times unforgiving.
The title itself, drawn from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (“The suffering of light is unbearable to me”), captures this paradox: light both reveals and overwhelms, beauty arriving tinged with unease. As Webb remarked, “Colour is often about atmosphere, about a kind of emotional tenor. Sometimes it feels like the colour is the subject” (Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image, 2014).
Equally central is his mastery of chiaroscuro. Harsh sunlight carves through deep shade, dividing figures into brightness and obscurity. “Sometimes a shadow tells you as much as the light,” Webb has said (Magnum in Motion, 2009). This duality gives his photographs both theatricality and tension: illumination clarifies but also blinds, shadow conceals yet deepens the drama.
In Tehuantepec, Mexico, 1985, one of Alex Webb’s most evocative frames finds its fullest expression. As recounted in The Guardian, Webb describes stumbling upon this scene on a “heavy, muggy afternoon” in a white-and-blue plaza. He watched as a boy spun a ball on his fingertip, and—through what he later learned via the photograph’s slow shutter—saw the spinning orb blur into a “world spinning on his fingertip,” while a second ball, a basketball, also drifted into view like a ghostly echo of motion.
This anecdote anchors the image’s layered drama: at once intimate casual and uncanny. The turquoise wall behind the boys acts not as mere background but as a chromatic pulse, charging the scene with radiant energy. Webb’s description—“confronting the chaos and complexity of the world works better for me than dealing with a blank canvas” feels fully embodied here. In that heat-drenched moment, light becomes unpredictable theatre, colour becomes character, and the photograph itself becomes an accidental allegory of play and gravity.

Composition is the other axis on which Webb’s work turns. His frames teem with figures and fragments of narrative, layered diagonally and vertically, often verging on chaos but always pulled back by an instinct for balance. “I’m interested in the complicated, sometimes ambiguous moment,” he has said. “I like photographs that ask questions, not photographs that provide answers” (Magnum in Motion, 2009).
Each image rewards prolonged looking: gestures, glances, and shadows gradually coalescing into larger, unresolved stories. As Sean O’Hagan noted in The Guardian (2011), Webb’s photographs “brim with restless visual intelligence,” balancing narrative density with precise form.
What distinguishes Webb from the first generation of colour pioneers—Eggleston, Shore, Meyerowitz—is his embrace of excess. Where their work often foregrounded the everyday with a studied restraint, Webb thrives on simultaneity, layering colour, shadow, and gesture into what Max Kozloff has described as “operatic in scope, a theatre of colour and chance” (Photography & Fascination, 2010). His vision is baroque rather than minimalist: dense, ambiguous, and alive with multiplicity.
The Suffering of Light endures not simply as a retrospective but as a statement of intent: that the world, in all its contradictions, is most truthfully apprehended through the drama of colour and the complexity of composition. To open its pages is to step into Webb’s theatre of the street, not only the suffering of light, but its drama, its ambiguity, and its mystery.
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