December 31, 1949. As the clock ticked down toward mid-century, Todd Webb’s apartment rattled with dancing and laughter. Twenty-two bottles of champagne— and another ten of Remy Martin—had gone belly up and the partygoers were in high spirits. And why not? This was Paris, after all, and that night Webb’s apartment, tucked away on the outskirts of the 14th arrondissement, was the white-hot center of the expat photo scene: Robert Frank was there, as was Elliot Erwitt and Louis Stettner, among others. Forty guests in all, the last of whom skittered out and onto the cobblestone streets just as it was beginning to get light.
Webb wasn’t used to being in the center of the center. For four years he’d labored in Manhattan, at the edge of insolvency, devoutly carrying his heavy 8 x 10 setup from Harlem to Coney Island, focusing on the city’s architecture and characters. Webb’s quietly stunning pictures required patience to make and, in turn, rewarded the patient looker. Photography’s biggest names took notice: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Roy Stryker, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Beaumont Newhall, to name but a few, admired Webb’s thoughtful, elegantly composed frames. But that didn’t translate to widespread recognition or financial security.
So he’d figured he’d give Paris a shot.
The move proved life changing. Webb had been awed by New York’s size and scale, but Paris? The city swept him off his feet. “It is silly to say that I am nuts about Paris but I am,” he wrote in his journal, excerpts of which, typos and all, appear in these pages. “And with the light I had today it is a photographers dream.” And so, employing a small arsenal of cameras (a Rollei, a Speed Graphic, a Graflex, a Leica), Webb set out to see a city, and to record it. He photographed the aging buildings, peeling advertisements, and old-world streetlamps, which spoke to him of the sweep of time; the tradespeople, peddlers, and performers making their way through the streets; the narrow passageways that created endless opportunities for a disciplined photographer waiting for a few seconds of ethereal light.
Webb documented what he saw with a thrilling mix of carefully structured photographs and the more casual images he made with the Leica he was teaching himself to master. But what makes Webb’s images of Paris uniquely compelling is that they hold within them a subtle layer of self-disclosure. “There’s this wonderful balance,” explains curator and Webb scholar Keith Davis in an interview, “between what’s real—what’s outside of him—and what’s provoking that feeling of fascination and resonance.” Along with Webb’s unfailingly respectful gaze, you can sense his own curiosity and warmth rising gently from his pictures.
Post-war Paris was good to Webb. The city was in transition, with sleek cars sharing the road with horse-drawn wagons and pushcarts; reconstruction efforts were well underway, and the cafés positively hummed with life. The city offered much to look at and Webb took full advantage, wandering nook-and-cranny streets just as Eugène Atget, whose approach he’d long admired, had done a half century before. When Webb wasn’t scouting or shooting, he socialized with French photographers like Robert Doisneau and Willy Ronis (and even beat out artist Max Ernst for an apartment), and became a person-to-visit for American photographers on assignment, like Life staffers Gordon Parks and Eugene Smith, as well as Farm Security Administration documentarian John Vachon. (Being in Paris also allowed him to zip to Belgium, Denmark, and Germany where he made pictures for a US government agency demonstrating that the Marshall Plan was indeed revitalizing Europe.)
The City of Lights also held a few surprises for Webb. His time there became a period of artistic inspiration, but also a love story. Not long after he relocated, the 44-year-old career bachelor fell hard for a spirited 43-year-old American woman named Lucille. They would marry just five months after meeting—the New Year’s Eve party was the first they’d thrown as a couple—and remain together for the next 50 years, until Webb died in 2000, at the age of 94. After he returned to the States, Webb would go on to have a life marked by distinct chapters—his 1955 journey across America as a Guggenheim Fellow, his UN-sponsored five-month assignment in Africa, his 1961 move to New Mexico where he made incredible portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe—but in many ways, it was his time in Paris that would set the tone for everything that followed.
Todd Webb was always very intentional about his decision to press the shutter—a habit born during his days of nervously counting his nickels and exposures—and in the end, after four full years in Paris, he’d only made about 3,600 photographs. Fewer than three frames a day. But those images, now 75 years old, have aged remarkably well. Gorgeous, precise, heartfelt, and luminescent, Webb’s pictures reveal the inner life of the city. And, as the patient viewer will notice, they reveal something of his own inner life as well.
Paris: A Love Story 1948-1952, by Todd Webb, is published by Damiani and available for 45€.
