Todd Webb Joy Without Measure

Todd Webb Joy Without Measure


Joy Without Measure, features 80 gelatin silver prints of Todd Webb’s dramatic photographs. The exhibition highlights Webb’s significant contributions to American photography as represented in his images of New York City and Paris in the 1940s-1950s.

A master photographer, Todd Webb’s distinctive body of work has attained an important place in the history of American photography. Often described as “an historian with a camera,” Webb’s wonderfully rich images move beyond historical documentation, reflecting a more evocative and lyrical sense of time and place. His images are always deeply human and expressive, whether the subject is a group of children playing hand-in-hand on a New York summer day or an abandoned sculpture, left on a street during Nazi-Occupied Paris. Influenced by other well-known American photographers, such as Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, and Berenice Abbott, Webb often worked to explore a particular idea or concept yet allowed intuition to guide his sense of subject and visual structure. This integration of systematic looking and instinctive seeing is clearly evident in the photographs presented in Joy Without Measure. In 1975, Todd Webb and his wife Lucille moved to Maine, where they spent the last 25 years of his life.

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Manhattan Bridge from Madison and Pike Streets, 1946
Silver gelatin print

Photographs courtesy of Aucocisco Galleries, Portland, Maine, and the Estate of Todd Webb/Evans Gallery of Fine Art Photographs.

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