Memory City is a collaborative portrait of Rochester, New York, made by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb in the aftermath of Eastman Kodak’s bankruptcy and amid the uncertain future of photographic film. Published by Radius Books in 2014, it treats the city not simply as a location but as a place where industrial history, personal memory, and the changing status of the photographic image meet.
The book’s structure is shaped by contrasting approaches to medium and subject. Alex Webb used his final rolls of Kodachrome, whose once-vivid colour could then be processed only as black and white, producing images marked by an unusually weathered, elegiac surface. Alongside them are his digital-colour photographs of Rochester’s streets, whose saturated, layered observation punctuates the monochrome sequence. Rebecca Norris Webb, continuing to work with film, answers with colour portraits and still lifes of Rochester women, young and old. Her images form a quieter counterpoint, attentive to presence, absence, and the persistence of analogue practice.
Photography here is placed within a larger civic and cultural record. Quotations from figures associated with Rochester—including Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, John Ashbery, and Ilya Kaminsky—are woven through the volume, while a timeline traces the city’s cultural history from its vibrant past into its more complex present. These elements make the book more than a document of Kodak’s decline: they give its sequences a historical and literary resonance without resolving the city into a single narrative.
For collectors, Memory City deserves attention as a carefully constructed collaboration in which two distinct photographic languages remain visible and productive. Its subject is Rochester, but its deeper concern is how images carry memory when the technologies that made them begin to disappear. The 172-page English hardcover, issued by Radius Books under ISBN 9781934435762, offers a sustained meditation on that transition and on the fragile relation between material process, place, and remembrance.
