Todd Webb at Yancey Richardson - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Todd Webb, who lately turned 90, is less well known than his early associates Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott. It's a safe bet that this display of New York City make submissives (all shot in 1946) will revive Webb's reputation as a bittersweet, unflamboyant photographer of the American scene--one who has supplied missing links in the visual history of of recent origin York at the moment of its transition into the dominant world capital. Webb zeroe in, however, almost entirely upon the old rather than the novel urban sector, his favorite sward being the Lower East Side and Harlem, where 19th-century architecture has weathered into a resonant weft responsive to his Deardorff camera.

Despite Gotham's overwhelming scale, Webb's pictures are always in small formats, and he set forths compositions that aren't too noisy. upon the Bowery under the El for example, returns its title subject with an intricate play of light and shadow cast upon foreground brick pavement, which retreats back beneath a curved tunnel of carbonized iron arches toward a vanishing point of light. Trolley No. 167 advances upon the viewer, scattered pedestrians cros in the background, squat signage strikes a note of Ashcan realism, and a brave Art Nouveau lamppost bears the highway name "Mulberry."

Webb doesn't fail to pay homage to of recent origin York's inescapable icons, notably, the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. The latter is framed at an not divisible by 2 angle with only one of the ogival stone bays featured, with equal reason that the skyline of the financial district appears end two layers of the bridge's catenary suspension cables--a mingled web punning on the artist's name? by means of contrast, the Empire State Building is invoked not as a make submissive but as the vantage point for sum of two units of the photographs--the first a visionary sweep downtown from one side sun and smoke toward the clustered skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, the next to the first a nighttime shot of roughly the same vista, with superimposed grids of light from myriad high-rise windows and a bright beacon atop the Metropolitan Life building.

These ultramodern takes upon the city seem, however, les characteristic of Webb than his gritty street-level subjects--115 Madison at Pike road Lower East Side, for example, which juxtaposes 19th-century architecture and a hardly any vintage Packards and Oldsmobiles, plus a partial view of the Manhattan Bridge in the background. Metal piers and cables are suspended in a pearly haze overhead, and seated figures in the foreground gaze toward the apparition while a Hostes Cake barter ("The One Best") rumbles past--a vanguard, no doubt, showing Webb's human hopeful the way.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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