Rebecca Norris Webb

Rebecca Norris Webb (born 1956) first came across W. Eugene Smith’s “Country Doctor,” his famous Life magazine photo essay, while studying at the International Center of Photography in New York. She was immediately drawn to the subject of Smith’s essay, Dr Ernest Ceriani, a Colorado country doctor who was just a few years older than her father. She wondered: How would a woman tell this story, especially if she happened to be the doctor’s daughter?

In light of this, for the past six years Norris Webb has retraced the route of her 99-year-old father’s house calls through Rush County, Indiana, the rural county where they both were born. Following his work rhythms, she photographed often at night and in the early morning, when many people arrive into the world—her father delivered some one thousand babies—and when many people leave it.

Accompanying the photographs, lyrical text pieces addressed to her father create a series of handwritten letters told at a slant.

Back in print, this multilayered portrait of “the violet isle”—a little-known name for Cuba inspired by the rich color of the soil there—presents an engaging, at times unsettling document of a vibrant and vulnerable land. It combines two separate photographic visions: Alex Webb’s exploration of street life, with his attuned and complex attention to detail, and Rebecca Norris Webb’s fascination with the unique, quixotic collections of animals she discovered there, from tiny zoos and pigeon societies to hand-painted natural history displays and quirky personal menageries.

The result is an insightful and intriguing blend of two different aesthetics inspired by Cuba’s existence over the last 50 years in an economic, political, cultural and ecological bubble virtually untouched by the rest of the world, and unlikely to remain that way for much longer. Award-winning writer Pico Iyer provides an accompanying essay for this English/Spanish bilingual edition.