The photographs in Waves were made close to home. From March 2020 through May 2021, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb were largely sequestered on Cape Cod, and the book that emerged — published by Radius Books in 2022 — reads as a record of attention rather than a survey of a place: tide, weather, light moving through a house of many windows.

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is the acknowledged prompt. Alex Webb’s contribution is a sequence of panoramic seascapes made far from the dense, saturated urban scenes for which he is best known; he has described following the subtle movements of time and tide, wind and water. Rebecca Norris Webb photographed the waves of light as they passed through the couple’s house and wrote spare, handwritten poems that punctuate her images. Her photographs and his are not illustrations of one another. They alternate, and the writing sits between them as a third voice.

The collaboration has precedent. The two have worked together before, most visibly in Brooklyn: The City Within, and each has a long independent publishing record — more than fifteen books from Alex Webb, nine from Rebecca Norris Webb, who often interleaves her text and photographs. Waves belongs to that shared practice but occupies its own register: quieter, slower, addressed to a stretch of isolation that many readers will recognize.

The book is a hardcover of 108 pages and 48 images, in a landscape format of roughly 9.5 by 12 inches that suits the panoramas. For a collector, its interest lies in watching two established bodies of work answer the same constraint, not in any claim of scarcity. Note that the publisher lists a signed version under a separate ISBN; the trade edition described here is unsigned.