Rebecca Norris Webb: A Difficulty Is a Light
Rebecca Norris Webb’s latest work, A Difficulty Is a Light, is her inaugural hybrid poetry collection, interspersed with over a dozen of her evocative photographs. This elegiac book delves into the geography of loss—both personal and environmental—following the suicide of her sole remaining brother, compounded by the earlier loss of his identical twin. Through a series of glimpses, she traces the ever-shifting world of light, beginning in Trieste, Italy, and journeying from Cape Cod to the Dakotas, New England to the Carolinas, ultimately observing bird migrations in the American South and northern France. The collection serves as a meditation on various forms of twinning: birds and brothers, grieving and migration, loss and light, badlands and coastlines, words and images, and the interplay between seeing and dreaming.
About the Author
Born in Rushville, Indiana, Rebecca Norris Webb initially pursued poetry, studying English at the University of South Dakota. After experiencing writer’s block post-graduation, she turned to photography, seeking a medium that encompassed her curiosity about the wider world. Her work often intertwines text and images, as seen in her monograph My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—which was exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015.
An NEA grant recipient, Norris Webb has published several photography books exploring the relationship between people and the natural world, including The Glass Between Us, Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (with Alex Webb), and Night Calls. Her photographs have been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Le Monde. She often collaborates with her husband and creative partner, photographer Alex Webb.
Norris Webb’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the George Eastman Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York. She continues to teach photography workshops alongside Alex Webb, inspiring a new generation of photographers to explore the poetic potential of combining words and images
