Alex Webb was born in San Francisco, California, in 1952. He became interested in photography during his high school years and attended the Apeiron Workshops in Millerton, New York, in 1972. He majored in history and literature at Harvard University, simultaneously studying photography at the Carpenter Center for the Arts. In 1974, he began working as a professional photojournalist. He joined Magnum Photos as a nominee in 1974, as an associate in 1976, and as a full member in 1979.
During the mid-1970s, Webb photographed in the American South, documenting small-town life in black and white. He also began working in the Caribbean and Mexico, which prompted his starting to photograph in color, which he has continued to do to this day. He has published more than 15 photography books, including Hot Light/Half-Made Worlds, Under A Grudging Sun, The Suffering of Light, La Calle, and Dislocations. He has created six collaborative books with the photographer Rebecca Norris Webb, his wife and creative partner, including Violet Isle and, most recently, Waves.
Webb received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1986, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1990 and 2019, a Hasselblad Foundation Grant in 1998 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. He won the Leopold Godowsky Color Photography Award in 1988, the Leica Medal of Excellence in 2000 and the David Octavius Hill Award in 2002. His photographs have been the subject of articles in Art in America, the New York Times and other publications. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, in museums including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
