Night Calls begins with a borrowed question. Rebecca Norris Webb encountered W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor, his Life magazine essay on a Colorado physician, while studying at the International Center of Photography in New York. What stayed with her was less the photographs than a problem they raised: how might a woman tell this story, particularly a woman who happened to be the doctor’s daughter? Radius Books published the book that grew out of that inquiry, and it takes shape as a rural medical practice seen from inside a physician’s household rather than as a retelling of Smith.
For six years Norris Webb retraced the route of her ninety-nine-year-old father’s house calls through Rush County, Indiana, the rural county where both were born. She kept to his working rhythms, photographing often at night and in the early morning, the hours when people arrive in the world and when they leave it. Her father delivered about one thousand babies. Lyrical text pieces addressed to him accompany the photographs, handwritten letters told, in the publisher’s phrase, at a slant. The publisher frames the project as a meditation on fathers and daughters, on memory and one’s first landscape, on caretaking of the land and its inhabitants, and on a history that divides as much as it heals.
What distinguishes the book is the position from which it speaks: a daughter inside a doctor’s family, working in a county she calls home, addressing her father directly rather than explaining her images to a reader. That vantage shapes both the photographs and the writing. Set side by side, the two registers keep the project intimate without letting it collapse into private document.
For collectors drawn to photobooks that test the boundary between image and letter, the book’s interest lies in that structural decision rather than in any single picture. Its one hundred twenty-eight hardcover pages give the sequence room to move between night calls and early mornings, between clinical distance and familial address. Radius Books issued it in a trade edition and, separately, a signed edition.
