Both a poet and a photographer, Rebecca Norris Webb often weaves words into her photobooks. After the sudden loss of her brother, it was the words that came first and the photographs that followed. Initiating a journey through her grief, writing brought her to the depths of her inner hinterlands while photography kept her rooted in the world, orienting her outwards and upwards to trace bird migrations through the American South and Northern France.
A Difficulty Is a Light, the lyrical elegy that emerges from this voyage, gives form to the ineffable experience of loss. In the book, grief is an animate force that moves through the body and mind as it is grappled with, inhabiting it with the different rhythms that shape Rebecca’s words and echo out in the world in her luminous photographs. Anchored by this exercise of looking deeply, the book moves through the first year of grief when the absence is most charged, culminating in a moment of letting go.
In this interview for LensCulture, Sophie Wright speaks to Rebecca Norris Webb about finding solace in different landscapes, the restlessness of grief and the interplay of words and images.
Sophie Wright: There is a beautiful feeling of tending to grief through these images and texts. How was writing a different process to photographing in this respect? Do they bring you different things?
Rebecca Norris Webb: After my brother died in fall 2022, I had to deal not only with grief, but also the trauma of his unexpected suicide, something I’d never experienced before. With my other books, the photographs have led the way, so I was surprised in January 2023 when the first tercets arose, free floating at first, then later drawing other near. By early spring, I had some 30 of these three-lined stanzas, so it dawned on me that I might be writing my first poetry book, albeit a hybrid one, because I was also photographing. It was only near the end of the project that I began to realize that each of the tercets was a kind of glimpse—either out into the world or into my own inner landscape. So, in a way my photographer’s eye had helped guide me through a year of trauma and loss—look by look.

During this time, I found that the process of photographing pulled me back into the Badlands, prairies, marshlands and other landscapes that offered me solace and silence and space to grieve. Whereas I discovered that the discipline of writing poetry—whose rhythms often arose while walking and photographing or birdwatching—allowed me to hear the rhythm of my own trauma. Trauma is very visceral and insistent, and it chimed deeply within me, devastating me again and again in those first dark days of grieving. Over time, I slowly learned how to shape this unsettling rhythm into what became the refrain of the first section, Night Diving:
On the water, Trieste,
city of departures,
of bells ringing me.
That said, since I see the photographs as an integral part of the rhythm of this book-length elegy for my brother, I envision the images acting like a rest in music—lengthening the silence between the ten poetic movements, a silence often tinged with blue and gold.

SW: A sense of movement, both through emotions as well as the literal journey you are taking in following the birds, drives us through the book. Is there a relationship between movement and loss for you?
RNW: I’ve found that loss creates a kind of restlessness as one’s interior world continually shifts and changes. I felt uncomfortable emotionally, but I’d learned with my first loss that it helps to keep moving. During my grief for my remaining brother that meant walking and birding on Cape Cod, as well as traveling to the Dakotas in search of Long-billed Curlews—one of my favorite grassland birds, which is particularly vulnerable to climate change these days—to North Carolina to photograph the Chimney Swift migration, and lastly to Saint-Malo where I unexpectedly witnessed the dramatic Starling murmuration.

© Rebecca Norris-Webb/Chose Commune
In the end, it was the smallest movement that perhaps helped me the most—the simple act of looking up while birding. As I wrote in one of the tercets:
I dream of a window so high
I can’t stop looking up,
as if the eye alone could lift us.
SW: In a way this book is a pair with My Dakota, only in this project you are exploring geographies further from home. Did you know where you were headed when you set off or did it unfold en route?
RNW: I work intuitively, so although there was basic planning involved as far as where I was traveling, I was guided in my photography and writing more often by serendipity. For instance, when I was doing an artist retreat at a poet’s ranch near the Badlands, I didn’t foresee that I’d be spending a week with a Townsend’s Solitaire—which migrates south each winter from its arctic breeding grounds to the South Dakota Badlands. Nor could I have imagined that one particular bird wouldn’t leave my windowsill for a week, most likely trying to protect what he perceived as two juniper groves to use as his winter food source—the actual windbreak sheltering the house as well as the grove’s reflection in the window—a mistake often made by largely arctic dwelling migrants:
The Townsend’s Solitaire defends two worlds—
the juniper grove and its reflection.
Endlessly he sings on the sill between.
A friend noted that most of the emotional heavy lifting of the book is carried by the various birds, who flit through the words and photographs.

SW: How did you know when the project was finished?
RNW: Inspired by poet Mary Jo Bang’s book, Elegy—dedicated to her only son who died by an overdose—I decided to limit the writing to the first year following my brother’s death. At the time, it felt like the right decision, in order to protect my heart and ensure that I’d be able to move on emotionally. When I doubted this later on—realizing that I might not have enough distance to revise the poems in such a short deadline—a close friend, who’d also recently lost someone, reassured me: “That first year of grief is when one feels the person’s presence most vividly in the absence.”
About a year after my brother died, I noticed my grief was beginning to ease. Less distracted and restless, I found I was able to focus longer and more deeply out into the world. See, the last section of the book, echoes this in two ways. Firstly, it contains the longest, uninterrupted poem about the migrating Chimney Swifts. And secondly, See ends with three, or a ‘tercet,’ of photographs—Cottonwoods, Sunflowers, and Murmuration I—and the last two are double-page spreads, a nod to my gaze widening again to include both loss and wonder.
And fittingly the ‘last word’ of the poem is a photograph—Murmuration I, in which the dark flock appears to be rising skyward. That felt right to me, since grief often ends with a letting go.