Awash with lush, rich imagery and poetic text, Rebecca Norris Webb’s book Night Calls, published by Radius Books, is a gorgeous homage to her 99-year old physician father and to Rush County, Indiana – the small, rural county where both were born and raised. Photographed mostly at night and in the early morning, Rebecca mirrored her father’s work patterns, as he was often called to patients during the twilight hours. Accompanying her imagery of liminal stillness, landscapes of disorienting beauty and hints of decay, and portraits of former patients are her hand-written musings; bittersweet recollections of history and family ties, and deeper questions she poses directly to her father:

The sycamores I understand, each scale of their weathered bark is fit for a peelin’ from childish hands. Perhaps here and there a jackknife scratches into the tree skin an overture of young love. A rusted nail once precariously an iron protuberance is now enveloped by the same bark and it is sinking into the torso of the green and brown sycamore.  The nail’s head now reminds me of an awkward bellybutton as the skin of the tree stretches to accommodate its mass before the tree’s invisible maw can work its iron victim from sight. It is a slow process and the casual observation of the sinking nail will give little up to the viewer, but over time and over repeat returns, the nail’s “progress” can be seen as a testament to the march of all things.

Looking again at the work now that My Dakota is finally a book, I realize that I was photographing this particularly dark time in my life in order to try to absorb it, to distill it, and, ultimately, to let it go. Not only did my first grief change me, but making My Dakota changed me as well, both as a human being and as a bookmaker.