Lucille Webb, wife of renowned photographer Todd Webb, 101
La N
http://www.timesrecord.com/website/main.nsf/news.nsf/0/8B96CE3A21FFD73B052573D200565264?Opendocument
Lucille Webb, wife of renowned photographer Todd Webb, dies at 101
Rachel...@TimesRecord.Com
01/16/2008
BATH - She was one of the extraordinary people living every day among
us in ordinary ways.
That's how filmmaker James "Huey" Coleman sought to portray Lucille
Webb in a documentary film about her acclaimed photographer husband called
"Honest Vision, A Portrait of Todd Webb."
But Huey's 1996 film, made decades after the couple moved to Bath to
spend some of the last years of their lives together, couldn't have been
complete without Lucille, an integral part of Webb's life and work and a
compelling person in her own right.
Lucille died Saturday in her Auburn apartment, seven years after her
husband. She was 101.
Patten Free Library Director Anne Phillips remembers Lucille and Todd
as frequent visitors to the library on Summer Street in Bath. "They were the
sweetest, most unassuming couple. They were so solicitous of each other,"
she said.
While they always came together, Phillips said it was Lucille who
would remember to ask about her daughter and engage in conversations.
"She was the more outgoing of the two," Phillips said.
Lucille was often described as the emotional and financial mainstay of
Todd's artistic career. But before she soldered her life to his, she was the
accomplished and refined woman with whom he fell and stayed in love.
Born Sept. 16,1906, Lucille Minqueau grew up in New York City, where
she attended classes at New York University and Barnard College. She also
studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1924.
She worked as a dancer, personal secretary to opera star Lucretia Bori
and in advertising before traveling back to Paris in her early 40s. There,
she met Todd Webb, an American photographer living in Paris.
She left her advertising job to marry him in Paris on Sept. 10, 1949,
less than a week before her 43rd birthday.
"She loved him so much that she wanted to do that," said Michael
Rowell of Portland, a photography critic who met the Webbs when they moved
to Portland in 1976 after living in Paris, New York, New Mexico - near
artist and friend Georgia O'Keeffe - France again and England.
"When you're the wife of a man as famous as Todd and as well liked as
Todd, it sort of forces you into the background," said Stephen Halpert, who
curated shows of Todd's work at the University of New England. But for all
her efforts to support her husband, Lucille never lost her independent
spirit, he said.
"I would describe her as a woman of strong opinion, exquisite taste
and refinement. She was feisty and charming," he said. "She was perfectly
happy to sit by quietly at an exhibition where Todd was getting all the
attention. But when you were sitting at the dinner table, she and Todd were
absolute equals."
Huey said his film addresses Lucille's role in Todd's art. It was
Lucille who worked in New York while Todd trod across America photographing
the country as part of two Guggenheim fellowships he received in 1954 and
1955.
And it was she who often managed business details of his work and
looked for opportunities to champion it.
"She had her own life. But her role wasn't just to run the business;
it was to nurture and encourage Todd to fulfill his vision," he said.
Rowell recalled a story about a visit paid by celebrated photographer
Paul Caponigro to Lucille's bookstore in New Mexico, where she sold
paperbacks and Todd's photography:
"A man came in and saw some of Todd's photographs along the wall. He
said, 'These aren't too bad.'
"And she said, 'You must be Paul Caponigro.'
"He said, 'Oh, are you familiar with my work?'
"She said, 'No, with your attitude.'"
The story illustrates Lucille's protectionism toward Todd's work. "She
was always the one who was promoting Todd. She never liked the work of any
other photographers. Todd, on the other hand, used to like all the other
photographers, an unusual trait for a photographer," he said.
"There's a fun thing in my film where Lucille talks about
photography," Huey said, relating how Lucille phrased the frustration that
photographers in the art form's infancy encountered when they consistently
received lower prices than they wanted for their work.
"She said, 'I found that habit rather unattractive,'" Huey said. "She
would let you know what she was thinking, but always with respect."
Her respect and honesty made her a gracious host, one who would serve
her guests herself and one who opined articulately on politics and the
newest books, even at a century old.
"You felt like you were walking into an apartment of somebody who was
one-third her age and who was very artistic," Halpert said of Lucille's
Auburn apartment at Schooner Estates.
Huey recalls staying for hours that passed like minutes at the Webbs'
home in Bath, where they lived until 1999. He aligns the Webbs with an era
of artists who "had a frugal lifestyle, but had very great taste."
Her taste extended to her personal appearance, which bespoke her
dancing days and regard for those around her. "She just presented a
completely made person. She was always fastidious about how she looked,"
Halpert said.
Phillips remembers her walking into the library on a sweltering summer
day dressed in her winter coat because her petite frame chilled easily.
An "ultimate team," the Webbs lived at their North Street home in Bath
until well into their 90s, when they decided to move to their
assisted-living apartment in Auburn. When Todd died in 1999, Lucille
continued her life at their apartment.
Halpert remembers Lucille organizing a visit by a fraud expert for
residents at Schooner Estates after she received a scam letter in the mail.
"Here she is at 99 protecting all the 70-year-olds from these
predatory solicitors," he said.
Yet, while her interest in life around her continued, Lucille missed
her life's love.
"For all of the vitality she had, I don't think she took a great joy
in life without Todd. But she never let you know that. She never acted sad.
She never acted if you should feel sorry about her," Halpert said.
A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. Jan. 25 at the Tenant's
Harbor Room at Schooner Estates in Auburn.
Hyfler/Rosner
--
"La N" <nilita20...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> http://www.timesrecord.com/website/main.nsf/news.nsf/0/8B96CE3A21FFD73B052573D200565264?Opendocument
>
> Lucille Webb, wife of renowned photographer Todd
> Webb, dies at 101
> Rachel...@TimesRecord.Com
> 01/16/2008
> BATH - She was one of the extraordinary people living
> every day among
> us in ordinary ways.
>
> That's how filmmaker James "Huey" Coleman sought to
> portray Lucille
> Webb in a documentary film about her acclaimed
> photographer husband called
> "Honest Vision, A Portrait of Todd Webb."
>
What a great obit. Thanks for posting. And my favorite
(everyone's favorite) Todd Webb photo is the first one you
see on this site after you enter. A panoramic photo of 6th
Avenue in 1948, I think. Gorgeous.
http://www.toddwebbphotographs.com/
And Todd Webb's NY Times obituary, which was never posted
here:
April 22, 2000
Todd Webb, 94, Peripatetic Photographer
Todd Webb, a photographer who documented the everyday life
and architecture of New York, Paris and the American West,
died last Saturday at Central Maine Medical Center in
Lewiston. He was 94 and lived in Auburn, Me.
Solid and dignified, with a sharp focus and full tonal
range, Mr. Webb's works placed him squarely in the company
of renowned American regionalist photographers of the
1930's, 40's and 50's like Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans,
Ansel Adams and Edward Weston during his later landscape
period. Quiet and unassuming, Mr. Webb was fond of saying
that the secret to taking a good picture was simply knowing
where to stand.
Born in Detroit, Mr. Webb spent his childhood there and in a
Quaker community in Ontario. At the onset of the Depression
in 1929, he moved to California, where he earned a meager
living as a prospector. He eventually returned to Detroit,
where he took a job with the Chrysler Corporation and tried
writing in his spare time. When a friend invited him to
travel to Panama in search of gold, Mr. Webb was granted a
leave of absence by his boss, who sent him on his way with a
camera.
In the late 1930's his fascination with the medium
flourished as he honed his skills at the Detroit Camera Club
and under the tutelage of Ansel Adams. After obtaining a job
as a Navy photographer during World War II, with the help of
Adams, Mr. Webb moved to New York with a friend, the
photographer Harry Callahan. He soon established himself as
one of the most successful postwar photographers.
At the height of his career, Mr. Webb traveled to Paris,
where he met his wife, Lucille, a New Yorker, and produced a
vivid record of the city that earned him comparisons to the
French photographer Eugene Atget. Later the Webbs settled in
Santa Fe, N.M., at the suggestion of their friend Georgia
O'Keeffe, before moving on to Provence in France, Bath,
England, and, finally, Maine.
In 1955, armed with his camera, a 40-pound rucksack and a
Guggenheim fellowship, Mr. Webb set out in the footsteps of
the 1849 Gold Rush pioneers, traveling by foot, bicycle,
motor scooter and boat from New York to San Francisco. Over
the course of five months he compiled some 7,500
photographs, immortalizing the immigrant trails, ghost towns
and frontier buildings of the West.
''I had seen the country as I never had before,'' he wrote
in The New York Times about his adventures.
Mr. Webb's photographs are displayed in 25 major museum
collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. More
than 1,400 of his pictures are held by the Center for
Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
He is survived by his wife.