Opening reception: Todd Webb: Photography across New York, New Mexico, and France

Join us for refreshments to celebrate the opening of the exhibition, held on the 5th Floor of the Glickman Library in the Aperture Gallery.

Todd Webb: Photography Across New York, New Mexico, and France will focus on Webb’s photographs as they engage with the three locations in its title. Showcasing our University’s collection alongside loans from the Todd Webb Archive and Distinguished Professor Emerita Rose Marasco, this exhibition brings together many aspects of Webb’s place-based photographic approach.

The exhibition coincides with the showing of the Portland Museum of Art’s Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa. The Museum’s exhibition presents a recently recovered photographic series by Webb, in which the United Nations commissioned him to document emerging industries and technologies in nine countries on the African continent. Together, the University’s Photography Across New York, New Mexico, and France and the Museum’s Outside the Frame create a singular opportunity to see multiple facets of Webb’s oeuvre here in southern Maine.

Parking available in the Bedford Street Garage.

About the artist

Todd Webb was born in Michigan in 1905 and took up photography in the 1930s. He produced a unique body of work with an important place in American photographic history. Webb’s images are straightforward but reward audiences with details and complexity upon closer inspection. Frequently referred to as “an historian with a camera,” his rich photographs document life all over the world. Webb’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in numerous museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

—Todd Webb Archive

Webb & the Unviersity

The University of Southern Maine is fortunate to house a formidable collection of photographs by Webb, stemming from his time as the Art Gallery’s inaugural visiting artist in 1987 and his accompanying solo exhibition, Todd Webb: Historian With a Camera. The show featured fifty photographs, ten from each of the following decades: the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. After the exhibition, Webb asked the show’s co-curators, Juris Ubans, Director of the Art Gallery, and Rose Marasco, Art Department faculty member, to select photographs from each of the decades as a gift from him to the Art Gallery.

The reception and exhibition are sponsored by the Todd Webb Archive.