ZA :

In A Difficulty Is a Light there is a verse where you write- “isn’t my attraction to words and images a kind of twinning?” Could you talk through this process of pairing the two mediums? Do the words usually come first, followed by the image? Or is it the other way around?

RNW :

For my other nine books, the photographs led the way and the words followed. I just assumed this is how I would always work. A Difficulty Is a Light surprised me when the words took the lead. As an artist and bookmaker, it’s always good to be humbled by one’s creative process.

ZA :

To me, your photographs are lyrical universes that exist parallelly to ours. They act as lucid dreams that guide the reader through their own introspections. Do you find that there has been a shift in the way you first began making photographs in comparison to your practice now?

RNW :

Thanks for your thoughtful question. I’m on Cape Cod as I write this, and on one of my magnetic studio walls is Glimmerings, a selection of color photographs from the past 30 years. So, a variation of your question is one I’m trying to think through as I select and sequence this work, which will likely be my next book. Looking at work that I’ve made more recently—say over the past decade—I feel my response to light and shadow has expanded somewhat. I also see, in particular with A Difficulty Is a Light, a gold/blue palette that brings together complementary colors in the same frame. Perhaps this dark/light, cool/warm shift in my way of seeing echoes a change in my sensibility to a more expansive way of seeing. In the past, I’d often shy away from difficult or dark or complicated emotions. These days, however, I welcome them into my work, no matter how difficult or elusive or half-formed or shifting or contradictory those emotions may be, including the ever-changing weather of emotions I feel while grieving a personal or an environmental loss—and sometimes both at once.

ZA :

That’s interesting because when I think about your photographs, I imagine them fringed by the colour blue that shifts through multiple tonalities. Whether it’s sapphire, midnight blue, sky blue, or greyish blue, I find its presence strongly in your imagery. Could you elaborate on this relationship with the colour, and if there is an anecdotal association with it?

RNW :

I was surprised and delighted when Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi—the Chose Commune publisher and book’s designer—first showed me the gem-like blue cover design, featuring one of my Saint-Malo murmuration images. I was particularly drawn to the sapphire blue paper. Later I realized that the shade echoes the deep blue of the evening sky during which I photographed bird migrations in France and North Carolina. Working in this sapphire light just before nightfall—when one has to strain to see, and the world around us begins to soften and blur—was also when I felt closest to my brother.

ZA :

Nature and birds’ flit in and out of the realms you create. In fact in A Difficulty Is a Light, you ponder- “…And what if bird were merely another name for brother.” Your work almost feels like you are migrating yourself. From one state to another, you shed, change, grow and embrace the long journey. Would you be able to introspect on this thought, and if you see it in a similar light?

RNW :

I love the notion of the long journey of grief as a kind of migration, in which one sheds, changes, and grows along the way. Like migration, grief pulls one along with a kind of visceral restlessness, as the mind, heart, and spirit are shifting and changing, an often awkward and uncomfortable state: “So slippery, these unruly / bruising transformations,” as I write in “North Light.” I made my way through these unsettling states of grieving look by look, as I followed the birds and the poetry across two continents, first with the distracted, staccato gaze that characterized those early months of grief and trauma. When I finally reached the far shore of my grief—about a year after my brother died—I found that my focus was slowly lengthening again, thanks to being mesmerized by the wonder of two migrations—the Chimney Swift migration in North Carolina, and the Starling murmuration along France’s Brittany coast. Yet, this sense of wonder was far from easy—it was complicated, enriched, and given depth by the shadows of personal and environmental loss: So close now, loss and astonishment, like brothers. The poem ends with a “tercet” of three photographs—Cottonwoods, Sunflowers, Murmuration I—the last two double-page spreads, echoing this widening view of the landscape that includes both loss and wonder. And Murmuration I feels like a fitting ending to this elegiac poem, with our eyes looking up as the dark flock flies skyward. For doesn’t the end of loss involve a letting go?

ZA :

I am intrigued by the continuous collaboration between you and your husband, Alex Webb. The intrigue stems from the fact that your photographic styles are so vastly different and can still sit effortlessly on the same plane. Alex’s strong photojournalistic language so interestingly compliments your soft quieter imagery. I was wondering what binds the two languages together - and if like your poetry and photography - Alex’s images are often responses to your thoughts, and vice versa.

RNW :

Our collaborations keep surprising us. We’re not entirely sure why our photographs continue to talk with one another, sometimes in new and unexpected ways. I think the best way to describe this conversation between our images is that they work somewhat like “slant rhymes,” which are not full rhymes but half rhymes. Translated into visual terms this means our paired photographs sometimes “rhyme” by sharing a similar palette, tone, or penchant for the surreal or resonant moment. Additionally, I think we both agree that working together allows us to enter creative territory that we probably wouldn’t have ventured into otherwise. That said, it still remains largely a mystery to us why our collaborations work, which delights us, confounds us, and reminds us that after being married for 25 years and best friends for 36 years, there are still things left to discover in our creative relationship. Website: webbnorriswebb.co Instagram: www.instagram.com/webb_norriswebb