EARTH Foundation presents, in collaboration with Magnum Photos, the new exhibition project Errand and Epiphany: a personal project of the American photographer Alex Webb (San Francisco, 1952), member of the agency Magnum Photos. The exhibition is open to the public from Thursday 27 March to Sunday 21 September 2025 at the Art House of Eataly Verona.
Errand and Epiphany was presented for the first time in 2023 at the Museum Helmond, in the Netherlands, as the first institutional survey of Webb’s work over the last thirty years, and arrives in Verona with a new set-up, designed specifically for the Foundation spaces.
The exhibition includes 78 photographs that reveal the originality of one of the pioneers of the second generation of photographers active with color, able to transform the visual language into an emotional and vibrant narrative. To suggest the title is the American writer Rebecca Solnit, who in one of her writings states «The magic of the street is the union between mission and epiphany». For Webb the mission is to collect fragments of stories from people in remote places on earth and the epiphany is the moment of revelation, when banality turns into surprise.
With a literary-historical background, Alex Webb decided to dedicate himself to photography as a photojournalist. After a first exercise in black and white, which immortalizes the life of a small town in South America, Webb begins to shoot in color on his long journeys that take him to the ends of the world: Haiti, Mexico, sub-Saharan Africa, India, Turkey, USA, are the countries in which he searches, with a hungry and curious gaze, stories of everyday life, of marginalization and abuse, to transform them into narratives with a magical tone.
The photographs of Alex Webb collected in exhibition reveal his spirit as a street photographer, as he calls himself. His approach is driven by a sense of curiosity and discovery towards the places and people who live there: «Every project is a journey without a clear destination. Once the journey has started, it is the photograph that tells me where to go». The scenes immortalized by Webb not only tell stories, but suggest unexpected visions and perspectives. Enclosed in harmonious compositions, each image reveals daily scenes of work, leisure, play, escape, waiting, in an alternation of marked shadows and clear geometries, in which the subjects, often unaware, They become protagonists of a daily theater that in some cases does not fail to leave uneasy who observes them.
Shooting on the street, Alex Webb captures moments of pure liveliness destined to turn into anything else in no time. The photographer’s style is defined as an organized chaos, bordering on saturation, not only for the use of vivid colors, but also for the multitude of subjects that populate his shots. Webb is able to synthesize in the image his vision of things, attentive to details and narration, which returns in the overlapping of several planes until the background, to close a complex scenography.
The use of colour film is a very personal mark of Alex Webb’s photographic research, fascinated by the dazzling light and intense colours of the territories he visits. «For me colour is based on emotions. It’s not about seeing colours, but about feeling the emotion they convey», says the artist. Colours also play a decisive role in Webb’s creative process, guiding him visually and emotionally on his journeys of discovery. The emotional component is therefore central in the work of the American photographer, who moves free from preconceptions, driven by curiosity and intuition. Alex Webb’s photography also takes into account the literary influences of his youth, from Graham Green to Gabriele García Marquez, and those philosophical ones that inspired his poetic imagery.
Errand and Epiphany from the Earth Foundation is a special opportunity to meet the work of American photographer Alex Webb, who has a career steeped in international awards and recognition, including the Leopold Godowsky prize for colour photography in 1988 and the Leica medal of excellence in 2000.