When photographer Joseph R. Webb first moved to Philadelphia in 2014 from Portland, Oregon, he only had a vague concept of the scale and condition of poverty in many US cities. He landed in Fairmount, which is a neighborhood just south of Sharswood, Brewerytown, and Strawberry Mansion, among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Sharswood is the neighborhood most intensely documented by Webb, and is where the Norman Blumberg Apartments (Blumberg projects) were located until their demolition in 2016. These projects were made up of two 18-story towers, a 13-story building for seniors, and three blocks of multi-family low-rise buildings, which the Philadelphia Housing Authority website describes as, “In contrast to the vibrancy and strength of nearby neighborhoods, the blocks immediately surrounding Blumberg include a large concentration of vacant and blighted buildings and lots, and suffers from a violent crime rate that is 1.5 times greater than the citywide crime rate.” As Webb points out, “It’s quite the indictment from the agency in charge of that property and the wellbeing of the people living there.” Within the first two weeks, he immediately discovered how poor neighborhoods and rich blocks could sit right next to each other with their borderlines not immediately obvious.

At this specific moment, not only was Webb’s environment changing, so was America’s. The photographer’s arrival to Philadelphia took place just a few months prior to Michael Brown’s killing by police in Ferguson, Missouri, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. This event brought the age-long discussion of socioeconomic disparity, systemic cultural issues, and police brutality from the living rooms of people of color to being broadcasted directly to every citizen of the United States. No longer were these conversations optional; every family in America was forced to confront the question: “How does my reality compare to the rest of the individuals in my own community, and what have I been missing for so long?” Joseph Webb took it a step further as he began to document and, by relation, consider and understand the cultural backdrop of this new America. Instead of watching it on the news, he began to report on it from behind his own camera.

Joseph Webb’s series Greater Philadelphia is a documentary project that achieves more than cold journalistic reporting. He has created a nuanced visual portrait of North Philadelphia neighborhoods by bringing together different approaches to documentary photography – from portraiture to landscape, to staged images and candid street photography. Combining these approaches while utilizing familiar pictorial elements, like pleasing color, composition, and photographic perspective, allowed for the creation of images that strive to be beautiful at a superficial level while simultaneously making it easier to introduce complex or unexpected subject matter to viewers. The images contained within his series challenge our assumptions and stereotypes by not ignoring them but exploring them. While there are undoubtedly unsettling and complex events, including violence, drugs, or poverty, there are also scenes of community togetherness like the scenes he captured in the New Life Church of God located in the North Philly neighborhood of Franklinville.

Webb’s motivation for his series is undeniably due to his concern with social justice and sensitivity toward marginalized individuals’ underserved humanity. However, his approach to this project has clear roots in his childhood experience. No stranger to hardship, his background consisted of a mixed experience from a socioeconomic and stability standpoint. Though it wasn’t a decades-long tour through poverty based in systemic disparity, he had a short but intense firsthand bout with financial and familial uncertainty. Around the time he was 11 years old, his father’s ongoing psychiatric illness and substance abuse issues (that he never was able to receive proper help for) began to spiral him into a dark place that ultimately led to his parents’ separation. His mother, who was strong up until this point, did not deal with this well and suffered through a severe bout of alcoholism that derailed her life for several years. It was during this time his family collectively decided it would be best for him to live with his father. This decision turned out to be disastrous. Webb ended up living in borderline poverty conditions where food was often scarce and drug users frequented his home. This situation persisted for more than a year, but his father was forced to leave by other family members once the extent of his child neglect became clear and it was discovered that his father was manufacturing and selling meth in the home. At this time, his maternal grandparents moved into the home and finally provided some stability and reliability for young Webb. Reflecting on this turbulent time in his life, he shared with us, “It was really confusing as a kid, to be looking up to and expecting care from parents who couldn’t take care of themselves.”

Flash-forward to 2008, Webb enrolled in the Pacific Northwest College of Art to pursue a BFA in General Fine Arts with an emphasis on photography and printmaking. However, the years leading up to this were not just a simple transition to higher education. He was plagued by his own psychiatric problems and drug use, which included putting his own life in danger, coming close to losing a prestigious scholarship, and being faced with expulsion. He ultimately persevered and graduated in 2011. His education during this time left a lasting impression on his photographic philosophy as he loved being surrounded by his peers and instructors who were all artists, inspiring him to see the world from consistently different perspectives. Though this camaraderie was without a question the highlight of his time there, he often felt there was “an overemphasis on a postmodernist and critical theory approach to art-making, as if your artworks were more like illustrations of your written, conceptual framework rather than things in themselves.” It made him think deeply about his art and how it related to concepts and the varieties of interpretation that viewers could bring to it. However, by the end of his time there he became increasingly skeptical of this overly intellectualized approach to practice and analysis. With this in mind, he has many memories of his parents coming to visit the campus to see student exhibitions and remembers them politely expressing that they didn’t really understand what they were looking at. He often thought, “neither do I,” which is why he now emphasizes emotion, intuition, and the concept of “democratic beauty” in his personal photographic work.

Now in 2023, Webb has spent close to 12 years working as a full-time commercial photographer, landing staff positions in Portland, Philadelphia, and Southern California, where he has been for the last three years. His career in this industry has allowed him the financial stability to pursue his artistic practice at night while honing his technical skills during the day. Although COVID has seen him laid off from his last staff photographer job, he is grateful for the downtime that has provided him a sense of equanimity and given him the time necessary to really expand on his darkroom practice. Through this, he has been given the opportunity to dive deep into the 100+ rolls of 120 film he exposed while living in Philadelphia from 2014-2018.

I wish we had more pages to really dive deeper into all his wonderful ponderous thoughts on his photography philosophy. With that being said, I believe this is the best segue into his work in his own words:

“I’ve heard many times from several sources that all art is a self-portrait to one degree or another, and I feel it is an important truth about artistic expression. An artist can never truly divorce his or her experience, values, concerns, etc., from his or her work. Once I accepted and internalized this view of art, it became clear that I needed to amplify and not try to obscure themes of deep personal importance in my work, both as characteristics I was trying to capture in photographs and the source of motivation for making photographs. There is an idea that I think compliments and expands upon the idea that all art is a self-portrait, which is that all artists are creating a mythology, or at least an idiosyncratic mythological system through which they try to represent the world.”

INTERVIEW

Michael Behlen: How did your vision for your project “Greater Philadelphia” come to be? Did it start out as a concrete idea, or did it develop into one from your time there? When and how did you decide to pursue this project seriously?

Joesph R. Webb: When I first moved to Philly, my head was spinning. I moved there to be with my significant other. Traveling has always been an anxiety-inducing experience for me, so I had never really traveled outside the western part of the US. At first, I found Philly to be overwhelming. I had a vague awareness that many US cities had huge populations living in poverty, but I did not understand what that looked like or felt like—poor neighborhoods and rich blocks of a city can sit right next to each other, with borderlines that are not immediately obvious. However, I walked around and took pictures like some sort of compulsion, so, within a week or two of moving to Philly, I guilelessly walked from Center City to Point Breeze, which is probably the most disadvantaged neighborhood in South Philly. The idea of undertaking a multiyear documentary project wasn’t fully formed after that day but something did click in my mind, and I knew that I needed to explore the city to try to understand it.

Looking back at the chronology of my photographs, the concept of a more specific project began to take shape at the beginning of 2015. I had begun to establish meaningful contacts in different neighborhoods throughout North Philly. That’s when my productivity began to pick up and the project became more focused. Given that most of the substance of my photographs came as a result of my relationships with people in the city, my project felt like it took shape organically.

MB: You had significant motivation to undertake this project from a concern of social justice and a sensitivity toward marginalized individuals’ underserved humanity. Can you tell us more about this?

JRD: I lived in a neighborhood called Fairmount the entire time I was in Philly. Fairmount is just south of the neighborhoods of Sharswood, Brewerytown, and Strawberry Mansion. Sharswood is a very small neighborhood with the Blumberg projects at its center. Many blocks were half vacant lots and most of the inhabited row homes were not in good shape. However, everyone I met there was friendly, willing to talk, interested in what I was taking pictures of, and generally just making ends meet and living their lives. Their pace of life, including the ways in which people comported themselves and their informal economies and support systems reminded me a lot of the poverty that I had seen and briefly lived through growing up in rural Oregon. I felt a strange kinship with people in many North Philly neighborhoods—swap the row homes for trailer parks and low-rent apartment complexes, and I kind of felt right at home. It was definitely easier for me to relate to blue collar people living around poverty and drugs than it was for me to acclimate to the weird social hierarchy and posturing that I found in the commercial fashion world. However, it wasn’t until I met some people who lived in the project towers that I got my first look at the conditions that the city, and our country more generally, called fit to house the most disadvantaged in society. I didn’t pity those people, as I think they would have been offended if I had, but the fact that a public bureaucracy had sent them to live in such a place saddened and offended me at the same time. I didn’t realize until then that there was a level of poverty and precariousness in life that I had never known and did not expect to see in America.

To answer the initial question, my concern with social justice and the lives of marginalized people as it manifests in “Greater Philadelphia” comes back to the belief I have in universal human value. At this point in my life, when I meet someone new I find it hard not to ask myself a lot of questions about what brought them to this point instead of making qualitative judgments of them. Much like the camera only ever captures a thin slice of time, the interactions and relationships we have with most people are just thin slices of their life experience. Photographs can have the power to remind the viewer that most of us make judgments of people with incomplete knowledge of their past experience, not to mention their unknowable potential (good or bad). I hope that approaching all people I photograph with humility and respect and without preconception, there is the possibility that I can render their likeness and surroundings in a way that primes viewers to reconsider presumptions or make an unexpected emotional connection.

MB: What is it about telling the story of a geographical location that compels you?

JRW: There is something very special about Philly that I still cannot fully articulate, but that is probably true of anything someone falls in love with or is emotionally moved by. If there wasn’t some quality of the thing that was just beyond description, the magic and allure might evaporate. I always think of what David Lynch said about Philadelphia when he moved there to attend PAFA in 1966: “I never had what I consider an original idea until I was in Philadelphia… Something clicked in Philly. That place really helped kick in something… So many things grew out of it, things I’m probably not even aware of. It was staggeringly important. The biggest inspiration of my life was the city of Philadelphia.” I am no David Lynch, obviously, but I admire his work and I feel like Philly had basically the same effect on me. I was seeing other people and the world around me in a new way once I moved there.

Lynch lived in Philly at a much different time in the city’s history when “all-pervading fear” of living in a “frightening city” were perceptions reinforced by him once watching a young man get beaten then shot to death in front of the young man’s own family from the window of his home on Wood Street. Like many other large US cities, Philly has rebounded from the depths of dilapidation and violence since the middle of the last century, but there are more than just traces of this dark atmosphere in large swaths of the city. However, it is not all violence, terror, and gloom. Yes, those things are still present there, but the quality of Philly that “helped kick in” my own inspiration to move into documentary practice was the position of these negative qualities butted right up against or even mixed in with an infectious spirit of being alive, stemming not just the comportment of people who live there, but this feeling like the city was a living thing. I know it sounds kind of like some new-age pseudo-spiritual affectation, and it may have just been culture shock to some degree, but it certainly left a huge impression on me and changed my whole relationship to art and photography.

MB: Your series doesn’t try to create “shock value” and yet you were able to capture an honest visual depiction of rough living with a sense of humanity. How do you feel you achieved giving these people a voice while at the same time not stereotyping them into a collective group?

JRW: I firmly believe that individuals’ shared humanity is the source of all compassion, empathy, and love in our lives. Shared humanity and the idea that everyone should be approached from a place of equal value is the primary motivation behind any photograph of a person I try to make. Perhaps keeping these ideas and values centered in my mind is how I (hopefully) avoid stereotyping or patronization.

This question you raise is incredibly important for any photographer who wants to make art in the documentary style. Ever since I was in college, I feel like Susan Sontag’s ardently pessimistic view of photography, especially anything resembling the documentary approach, has made any photographer with even a modicum of self-awareness very reluctant to engage with the practice. A line from “On Photography” always comes to mind as an encapsulation of her most critical views of the medium: “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” Sontag has crafted some of the most illuminating and lyrical prose ever written about photography, but I find a lot to take issue with this perspective, especially if one were to take it as some sort of proclamation that cannot be refuted. Maybe it’s best to keep her perspective in mind as a warning of what can go wrong if you are taking photographs with selfish motivations or you aren’t placing the dignity of subjects above your desire to make photographs of them.

Beyond the images I made in Philly, I think investigating stereotypes is not something artists should shy away from. Stereotype, as it relates to describing people, is more or less immediately connoted as being wholly bad, an immoral act, which I would generally agree with. But there is another level at which the phenomena of stereotypes are uncanny or peculiar, and it is the reason I think stereotypes of groups exist and will persist. This quality of stereotype is that they are usually based on an observable generalization—albeit a generalization that is often reductionist, negative, and situated to engender difference between the group/individual holding the stereotype and the group against which the stereotype is being deployed.

MB: Which of your images from your series do you believe illustrates this point?

JRW: My image of a black man wearing a grotesque mask is probably one of the only photographs I made in Philly that had a conceptual impetus. I made with the intention of directly confronting claims that my work was intentionally or naively pandering to stereotypes. Someone truly invested in disparaging stereotypes is not interested in the personal experience or perspective of any individual at which they are leveling the stereotype. Holding tightly onto stereotypes is much like putting a mask on a person, it erases their individuality and dehumanizes them. By way of contrast, the masked figure in my work should draw attention to the faces of the individuals represented in my work. If any viewers choose to see only or fixate upon any characteristics of these individuals that relate to certain stereotypes, I humbly ask them to try to look beyond these superficialities, to consider they might be projecting a reductionist interpretation onto another human being, and most of all to seriously doubt what one can know about anyone just by looking a picture of them.

MB: Do you feel like it’s necessary for people to go through similar things in order to relate to others, especially in regards to shooting documentary-style photography? How does that strength, both in forming relationships with your subjects and understanding them, play into your series?

JRW: I don’t think it is necessary to have a shared or parallel experience to gain a meaningful understanding of another person’s experience, but it certainly helps. This makes me think of the concept of standpoint epistemolog y in postmodern and critical theory interpretations of the world, which make one’s experience of the world completely incomprehensible to those not inhabiting the same standpoint. I find this view of the world to be unhelpful and pessimistic as it undervalues the ability of humans to cultivate understanding and compassion through avenues such as open-mindedness, attentiveness, and imagination. If you do not share a similar life experience with another individual, it can take a lot of effort and time to understand and appreciate his or her experience. A full understanding may never be possible, as it is not possible to fully inhabit the experience of another person. However, most people can come to value another’s experience that transcends feelings of difference and cultivates a meaningful bond. I don’t think organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières or most charitable exercises would exist without this human ability to appreciate others’ common humanity.

A desire to find, see, and relate to others’ experiences is the source of my motivation to work in the documentary style. It does not derive from a misguided desire to deal with personal psychological angst, but a sincere desire to develop understanding and connection with people who might superficially seem different than me. Curiosity plays an important role as well. Spending time with people too similar to myself can feel tedious. Meeting strangers, going through the transition whereby we become friends, and using a camera to facilitate and document this process is a powerful approach to resolving the tension between societally informed first impressions of a person, the possibility of mutual understanding and appreciation, and my curiosity of other’s individual experience. Photography is a great way to make friends, and you might as well document the developing friendship while you’re at it.

MB: I love that you use the term “democratic beauty.” Can you expand upon what you mean by this and how you achieve it with photography?

JRW: Beauty is a strange thing, it defies an analytical, objective description, but there is remarkable overlap among people and cultures for things like admiration of nature and the human form, so beauty also defies classification as a purely subjective quality. I am happy to sit with the ambiguous and indeterminate phenomenon of beauty. It seems like the artist’s prerogative to interrogate and play with beauty, not to try to define it.

I am, however, trying to identify the visual qualities underlying the norms of accepted pictorial beauty in the society in which I operate and deploy those normative qualities to expand the range of subject matter that a larger number of people can easily intuit as having a quality of beauty that might feel familiar to them. This approach isn’t a ploy to get viewers to think my work is pretty or to make it easily digestible, but to create an attractive tension in a wider audience. Using familiar pictorial elements like pleasing color, composition, and photographic perspective to create images that strive to be beautiful at a superficial level of reading makes it easier to introduce complex or unexpected subject matter to more viewers. The formal conventions of democratic beauty create a clear path to enter the work and find a sort of familiar delight in it, then the subject matter and/

MB: How does having a mindset of social change affect a photographer’s work? Is there any true way to be a documentary photographer?

MRP: Yes, I think having an activist mindset or a passion for addressing inequity in the world are powerful, positive motivations. This question is a great entry point for a broader conversation about the limits of art or artistic practice. There are certainly numerous examples of art that meaning fully moved societal consciousness: Käthe Kollwitz’s woodcuts about WWI, Francisco De Goya’s etchings depicting the Spanish Civil War, Dorothea Lange’s photographs for the FSA, not to mention the numerous brave photographers who have captured scenes of war and conflict over the last century. However, I am not sure the most successful of these artists or documentarians were working with certainty that their work would change hearts and minds or have a specific desired outcome. My guess is that socially engaged artwork which people find powerful and moving has those qualities because the artists are trying to communicate a deeper truth, whether that is a psychological truth, as in Kollwitz’s prints, or an attempt at descriptive truth, like Lange’s photographs of the Depression era. Sometimes the deeper truth is simply communicating the material conditions of a place or event, which is why the work of conflict photographers is so important, as people living relatively comfortable, peaceful lives can have a failure of imagination when it comes to the horrors of war.

The reason I emphasize doubt of authoritative description or artistic practice as a form of social activism in my own work is that it can result in work that feels patronizing, prescriptive, or loaded with an agenda. Somewhat counterintuitively, imagery that engages emotionally charged yet complicated issues like poverty or substance use with strong moral certainty or righteousness can come off as shallow, and this type of imagery doesn’t invite deep reflection even if it can generate a strong emotional response in the viewer. I think imagery with a sort of affected tone in service of moral certainty is likely to be polarizing: preaching to the choir when seen by those who share your moral certainty or social agenda, and seen as disingenuous or even as a sort of accusation by those who doubt your premise or moral authority. I am not going to tell anyone how to make art, especially if an artist is working from a place of good intention or deep concern for others. I actively encourage the use of those concerns as motivation for action and expression. I just see a lot of pitfalls in taking too seriously your conclusions about why the world is a certain way or how the world ought to be. I observe life to be full of convolution, complexity, and contradiction, however I value principles such as humility, humanistic universal value, curiosity, and empathy. So I try to form a delicate union between these observations and principles in my art, but that is just my personal approach.

MB: How can photography be a tool for empathy and understanding?

JRW: Since I was just a kid when I experienced adversity, my understanding of it was latent, as this experience was just a kind of amorphous raw emotion. Photography is one of the most important tools I ever encountered that gave me the means to make still a moment in life and capture the meaning I attached to that moment for further reflection. I think this relates directly to my compulsion to take pictures. Anyone who finds photography to be a medium imbued with a magical capability to capture some quality of experience might understand what I am describing here. Photography is able to unite the internal world with the external world, as it must be made from the light reflecting off the external world—something beyond the internal experience made external like painting or drawing. Anyone who takes the medium of photography seriously is likely a keen observer of human visual experience, even when he or she doesn’t have a camera with which to take a photograph. When I am in a particularly elevated state of mind, yet do not have a camera, I will often see scenes out in the world that feel like amazing photographs. I do not have a photographic memory so I cannot commit these exciting visual experiences to memory, and so they are moments lost to the stream of time. When I do have a camera and one of these moments occurs, I can make a photographic artifact that reifies this vision. If it is a good picture, some significant quality of this visual-psychological experience can be captured in a way that allows me to return again and again to this exalted state. If it is a truly successful image, it can even evoke a similar state in someone who views the photograph. Photography and art generally give us all, as artists or viewers, a chance to communicate the most powerful aspects of individual experience.

MB: The gear! We can not wrap up our interview without asking you for our readers: What cameras and film did you use to create your series and why?

JRW: My primary cameras are all 6x7—Mamiya 7II, Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, and a Pentax 67II. These cameras all have their own little quirks, strengths and faults, but the consistency of the 6x7 format is what is important to me. I just like the aspect ratio, and it is not too different from 4x5, so I can mix in 4x5 images with my 6x7 images with hardly any discontinuity. For large format images, I use a Toyo 45CF and a Sinar X with a 150mm Nikkor lens.

I am incredibly fickle, so having a variety of cameras that will all deliver good images keeps me from ever feeling too much gear regret. Ever since I bought a Mamiya 7 in 2015, my love of rangefinders emerged. For me, that type of camera is the ultimate facilitator of expressing the mind’s eye. Once I used that particular camera system for enough time, I began to internalize the way it would render a scene. So when I come across a subject or scene that I feel will make a good photograph, I have to imagine how the lens and film I am using will render it before I make the exposure, yet it’s always a really nice surprise when one of my mind pictures turns out to be a good exposure on film. I kind of like the lack of control and the surprise of the final image; I am not sure exactly why. Maybe it’s a progression toward accepting a lack of control over things in life more generally.

In regards to film: I shoot with all kinds of different film, but primarily color negative film since I almost always intend for my images to be printed via RA-4 optical enlargement. I don’t think I have any favorites, but Kodak Portra 400 and Portra 800 are stocks currently in production that I favor—not that there are many choices for 120 color negative film presently. The current Portra films print well, and Portra 400 especially is very forgiving in terms of under/overexposure. There are a few films I don’t like, mostly newer Fujifilm stocks, but those all seem to be going extinct, which is a huge loss for photography generally, if not for me personally.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Behlen is an instant film addict and the founder and publisher of Analog Forever Magazine. Behlen is an obsessive community organizer in the film photography world, including previously launching the independent publishing projects PRYME Magazine and PRYME Editions, two enterprises dedicated to the art of instant film. Through these endeavors, he has featured and published 250+ artists from around the globe via his print and online publications.

He has self-published two Polaroid photobooks -“Searching for Stillness, Vol. 1” and “I Was a Pioneer,” literally a boxed set of his instant film work. His latest book, Searching for Stillness Vol II was published in 2020 by Static Age. He has been published, interviewed, and reviewed in a quantity of magazines and online publications, from F-Stop and Blur Magazine to the Analog Talk Podcast. He loves the magic sensuality of instant film: its saturated, surreal colors; the unpredictability of the medium; its addictive qualities as you watch it develop. He spends his time shooting instant film and backpacking in the California wilderness, usually a combination of the two.

Connect with Michael Behlen on his Website and Instagram!