No.10 Gallery presents Jack Webb’s solo show, Showing Off in Private, opening this Thursday, October 20th and running through November 28th.  Dashwood Books will host a signing at the opening reception for Webb’s new book, Jack Webb Suspects His Parents.  Laumont Studio is proud to have produced scans and digital Cibachrome prints for the exhibition.

From the press release:

“Jack Webb wanted to photograph his parents having sex, but knew they’d never agree.  So the photographs in the show are not of Jack’s parents.  They are of couples who responded to a small ad, placed by Jack: ‘Professional photographer seeks genuine couples for art-based project around sex and sexuality.’  He got lots of replies, but it took a while to find the right people.  He didn’t want anyone who obviously performed.  He wanted something ‘quieter’.  The problem was the sorts of people who would respond to his ad were very likely to be show-offs.  So Jack spend hours on the telephone, listening to people’s sexual fantasies, hearing about their habits, weeding out anyone who sounded too much like a performer.  As he says, ‘If it’s real it probably wouldn’t be photographed.’  So he opted for the next best thing…” – Anoucha Grose

First commissioned in 1999 for the second issue of Richardson Magazine, A2, it took Jack Webb nearly three years to find and shoot his subjects. Webb’s images live in a world almost as foreign to us now as the idea of entering a stranger’s bedroom. Shot on film, the images sit in a world of celluloid embedded with a specific level of trust, but also a sense of danger and the unknown between photographer and subject, a relationship that has changed so drastically with the immediacy of the digital image. In addition, Webb found his subjects before the height of the Internet changed the way we meet, interact and address people. By finding these couples through an ad in the newspaper Webb’s subjects are freed from the instant-fame culture the Internet has created. Instead, they exhibit a rare opportunity in today’s world to find true intimate moments in a stranger’s world. No.10 is pleased to exhibit this beautiful and unique body of work over a decade after its nascence.