[The Guardian] The big picture: Alex Webb captures a fleeting glance in Mumbai, 1981

The big picture: Alex Webb captures a fleeting glance in Mumbai, 1981

Once a devotee of black and white, the Magnum photographer’s belief in colour was confirmed during a trip to India

The photographer Alex Webb believes that if you let yourself be open to the idea, you can “smell the possibility of a picture” before it happens. Your body senses an unusual or intriguing set of angles and colour and light and so “you sort of hang out a little bit and then this starts to happen over here and this starts to happen over here”, and an image resolves itself. He took this photograph travelling in Mumbai in 1981. “I wandered incessantly, trying to make visual sense of this complicated and often confounding culture,” he recalls. “Walking one morning, I glimpsed a pair of enormous eyes across the street. As I raised the camera to my eye, a child emerged from the shadows. I clicked the shutter.”

That chance encounter, included in a sale of prints from the Magnum agency this week, was a pivotal image for Webb. Having worked exclusively in black and white as a young photographer, he had been experimenting with colour since travelling to Haiti and along the US border with Mexico in the late 1970s. The “grey-brown reticence” of his New England childhood didn’t begin to seem adequate for the intense colour and piercing light he had found there. His trip to India confirmed that belief.

The Magnum Square Print Sale, to celebrate the co-operative’s 75th anniversary, will take place from 1pm GMT Monday 14 March to 7am GMT Monday 21 March. Magnum photographers are donating 50% of proceeds from the sale to the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross)

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Source: The big picture: Alex Webb captures a fleeting glance in Mumbai, 1981

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