Beautiful, chaotic, effervescent and unpredictable. KARIBIK by Alex Webb. out now.

It looks like a whimsical creation to oppose the abundance of beauty, overwhelming splendour merges with equally stunning catastrophes, both in nature and human kind.

The ambivalence of richness gives birth to the art of survival, a reckless pandemonium of numerous ethnicities and their cultures, languages, music and physiognomies, but first and foremost overflowing spirit, the much loved 'easy living' in the tropical heat.

Alex Webb from New York, whose work is held by countless collections and has been a member of the Magnum agency for three decades, knows the Caribbean like no other.

On several occasions, he has travelled to different worlds within the small and big Antilles for the newest issue of Mare, observing the people and their lives that are influenced by the eternal sea and came back bearing pictures, which are undogmatic and beyond documentation but with a fine sense for all the mysterious, incomprehensible colours and moods of this string of pearls amidst the Caribbean Ocean.

Alex was born in San Francisco in 1952 and first studied Literature and History at Harvard, before switching to Photography in 1972. His reports are primarily published by Life and New York Times magazine. In 1979, he became a full member of Magnum, the legendary Parisian photography agency.

Ever since then, he has been creating series of pictorial cycles on his journeys to the tropics, which are seen as essential works of contemporary photography.


Karibik
Nikolaus Gelpke (Publisher)
Photographs by Alex Webb
with text by Karl Spurzem
including "Klänge der Antillen" (sounds of the Antilles) music CD
124 Pages, clothbound with protective sleeve
ISBN 978-3-86648-009-4
58.00 € / 90.90 SFR