Photo: Rebecca Norris Webb, ‘Extinct Passenger Pigeon’, Diorama, Rochester Museum and Science Center
Memory City by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb (Radius Books) is an elegy to Rochester, New York. For 125 years, the city was home to Eastman Kodak, commanding 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales as late as 1976. Rivalry with Fuji film saw challenges for market share that were eventually overtaken by the rise of digital technology. Despite having invented the core technology used in current digital cameras, Kodak struggled financially and began downsizing before eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2012.
The photographs in Memory City were taken during five trips from April 2012 to April 2013. Edited to an exquisite rhythm of color and black and white, the book is a brilliantly produced objet d’art, with photographs that spill off the pages, revealing the fragility of the image in physical form. Each image reminds us of how intoxicating the intangible is, how we take photographs so as to render the freezing of time, so that we may go back to look again and again, at what once was and never will be again.
Memory City begins with the words of George Eastman, who observed, “Such a photographic notebooks…enables [one] to go back by the light of his own fireside to scenes that would otherwise fade from memory and be lost. “ With each photograph selected here, we are drawn into the story of America at the turn of the twenty-first century: a time when tradition meets transition and nothing will ever be as it once was.
Photo: Alex Webb, ‘St. Patrick’s Day, East End’
Film, the very medium by which these moments are preserved, has become the near-exclusive province of artists and aficionados alike. Its ability to do with light what no other medium can makes it unlike any other recording instrument. In a booklet titled “Notes on Film and Memory” slipped into a pocket that lines the inside back cover, Rebecca Norris Webb writes, “Is it the waiting I’ll miss most of all? Film insists on this: Time becomes a collaborator. What happens to the image in the back of my mind while I’m waiting for its non-identical twin—the image on the piece of film—to be developed? I sleep on it. I forget. I dismiss. I anguish. I misremember. I relinquish. Is it the waiting I’ll miss most of all?”
Photo: Alex Webb, ‘Kodak Tower’
Wise words in a world of instant gratification spurned on by technological tricks, somehow erasing the very magic upon which delicious glory of creation exists. It is in the dialectic between patience and insistence that we discover something new: the way in which the story unfolds, much like the timeline of Rochester that sits atop the pocket in the back, sharing the history of the city dating back to 1300 when the Seneca people of the Iroquois League settled their villages near the Genesee River and waterfalls, showing us the places where art, history, and industry overlap and engage. Taken as a whole, Memory City offers a way of seeing that is wholly original and intensely evocative of more than just a place but of a way of life that for many is seemingly slipping away.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
