My Dakota, by Rebecca Norris Webb

Rebecca Norris Webb   The Sky Below   TIMELightBox

My Dakota is an astonishing project in the form of a book and an exhibition by the photographer and poet Rebecca Norris Webb. Eloquently addressed as "the landscape of loss" by Suzanne Shaheen in The New Yorker, it is the documentation of Rebecca Norris Webb's journey into her home state of South Dakota, in the course of which she learned that her brother had suddenly passed away. The landscape of this region was among the few things that could ease her pain; "[i]t seemed," she argues in TIMELightBox, "all I could do was drive through the badlands and prairies and photograph. I began to wonder: Does loss have its own geography?" When James Estrin of The New York Times asked her what she learned from doing the project, Rebecca Norris Webb replied as follows:

It's taken me much of life to learn to trust my creative process, an often slow, meandering path towards understanding life and death and the world through the process of photographing — and sometimes writing about — images that intrigue me for some reason.

Rebecca Norris Webb   Hot Springs   TIMELightBox

Rebecca Norris Webb   Blackbirds   TIMELightBox

It is not often that one comes across work of such meditative expressiveness, aesthetic quality, and emotional magnitude; in short, photography rarely gets as exceptional as this. Rebecca Norris Webb is also an artist whose words matter; they correspond to the visual work in substantial ways, as in this excerpt from TIMELightBox:

They say your first death is like your first love—and you’re never quite the same afterwards. After my brother died, my photographs started to change. They were more muted, often autumnal. I remember saying to the writer, Linda Hasselstrom at her ranch house near Hermosa, South Dakota, where I did much of the writing for the book, "I see summer, fall, and winter, in the photographs, but not spring."

"When you’re grieving, there isn’t any spring," Hasselstrom replied.

 

Looking again at the work now that My Dakota is finally a book, I realize that I was photographing this particularly dark time in my life in order to try to absorb it, to distill it, and, ultimately, to let it go. Not only did my first grief change me, but making My Dakota changed me as well, both as a human being and as a bookmaker.

Rebecca Norris Webb   Storm Light   TIMELightBox