An introverted child, American photographer Rebecca Norris Webb remembers the pleasures of being alone while growing up in rolling hills of Rush County, Indiana. “I was most comfortable a few feet off the ground, usually on the lowest branch of a sugar maple or sycamore tree,” she says. “Hidden by the foliage, I learned a lot about light by watching it shimmer between the leaves. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been a daydreamer. Between ache and sky, I float by seeing.”
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But beneath the glittering light of the open sky, a darker, more disturbing world would reveal itself. As the daughter of a country doctor, Norris Webb recalls the grim reality of the circle of life: “Death and suffering were frequent visitors: the farmer who died in a tractor accident; the boy who walked with a limp because of TB; the racially motivated murder of the daughter of one of my father’s patients.”
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Imbued with a profound sensitivity, Norris Webb found voice through verse penning poetry until she found the words deserted her after college. Inspired to find a new vessel by which to channel life, she purchased a camera in the mid-1980s and traveled for a year, hoping the creation of images would spark poems upon her return.
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