Book Review: Rebecca Norris Webb’s Night Calls
Written by Summer Myatt, Images © Rebecca Norris Webb, Courtesy of Radius Books
To experience the world of Rebecca Norris Webb is to be gently plucked from reality and blissfully submerged into a soaring, utopian dreamland rich with deeply felt historical context, familial connections, and childhood memories. Diving into the first few pages of her newest book, Night Calls, feels like watching a Technicolor scene out of The Wizard of Oz. Cornfields bathed in golden sunsets, ethereally misty horizons, and delicate, white wildflowers against soft pink and blue cotton candy skies introduce us to Rush County, Indiana: the picturesque rural Midwestern town where Webb’s book takes place. Dotted with the author’s own thoughts and musings in wispy, elegant handwriting, each page of Night Calls reads like a diary full of touchingly personal, poetic stories of Webb’s past, her family’s history, and the legacy she hopes to leave for generations to come.
But perhaps above all, Night Calls is a poignant, heartfelt love letter from Webb to her father, a 100-year-old doctor who’s spent his life serving the residents of the small town in which he was born. The book is a culmination of Webb’s six-year-long photographic exploration and retracing of her father’s life in Rush County, illustrating his community impact, his upbringing, and the similarities Webb has discovered between herself and her beloved father. The book’s title was inspired by the doctor’s usual work hours and patterns, and Webb often photographed in the early morning hours and at night, symbolizing a time when many people come into – or depart from – the world. Portraits of his former patients – people he brought into the world, delivered as newborns – and recounted stories of the doctor’s memories and anecdotes fill the book’s pages with an undeniable cultural importance and a bittersweet reminder of life’s cyclical nature.
As an opus portraying the evidence of a life meaningfully lived, Webb’s work is unavoidably tinged with a sense of melancholia. She has an uncanny ability to make the reader feel the ghosts of the past peacefully lingering in the corners of these images, coexisting alongside rebirths and new beginnings. In one image, speckled sycamore trees glow bright red, bathed in the taillights of a car, against a deep blue twilight sky, accompanied by a poetic interjection by Webb: “And when we’re both ghosts? House by house, we’ll watch the porch lights coming on. Won’t the night be a kind of blossoming?”
This dichotomy between night and day, between death and birth, becomes blurred and almost symbiotic through Webb’s photos and writings. Headlights harshly illuminate a barren stretch of road underneath a dark night sky, and in the car’s rearview mirror, a stop sign shines before the spectacular gradient of an Indiana sunset; the last good ear of corn hangs limply, forgotten or overlooked, amidst an array of blackened, rotted husks; a small pair of hands clutches two spotted eggs above a lush green field of clovers. Webb’s work posits decay, brilliance, adolescence, and decline all on an equal plane, welcoming and celebrating the best and worst qualities of each facet of life – the highs and lows of being alive. Night Calls is a sparkling snapshot of existence, capturing not only Webb’s own complex history and perspective, but also the universal truths of the human experience.
