Boyd Webb

(New Zealand, born 1947)

Boyd Webb is a New Zealand-born British photographer. Webb’s surreal images consist of constructed scenes he creates by building sets in his studio and using actors for theatricality. While the sets are artificial-looking, the people in them are resolutely real—thereby consistently toying with the edges of real and imagined spaces. “Fakery and passing off has been a fascinating and essential part of human nature since the beginning and continues, it seems,” he once remarked, “at an ever more devious and accelerating rate. This has been an abiding interest.” His large-scale Cibachrome photographs often feature complex fiberglass sculptures which are composed into disconcerting scenes. Similar to natural history museum dioramas, Webb utilizes shifts in scale, lighting, and dark backdrops to create believable yet entirely artificial environments. Born in 1947 in Christchurch, New Zealand, he attended the Ilam School of Art in Christchurch before moving to England to study at the Royal College of Art in London. Webb was shortlisted for the 1988 Turner Prize, and has exhibited at such institutions as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijik in Amsterdam, and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others. Webb lives and works in Brighton, United Kingdom.