Wilson Webb

While he was still a student at MCAD, Wilson Webb ’95 got a job as a rigging electrician on the film set for Iron Will, where he began documenting Minnesota’s moment as a favorite 1990s movie location. “I had a very small 35-millimeter Olympus Stylus I’d always kept on my belt, and I was sneaking photos all the time,” he says.

That collection of stealth images, taken from more than a decade of movie and commercial sets, grew into an impressive portfolio that caught the attention of Joel and Ethan Coen, who hired him to be the on-set photographer for “A Serious Man” in 2009. “That’s when I switched unions, and left the electricians to join the camera department, Local 600, where I’ve been ever since,” says Webb. “I take photos that help sell the film–for posters, publications, and social media. But an equally important part of my job is to document the process of filmmaking and highlight the relationships that happen along the way, all the people working so hard to tell a singular story.”

If you’ve been to the movies in the last decade, you’ve definitely seen Webb’s work, from the marquee posters for Little Women and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, to current streamers like Causeway and White Noise. Based in Minneapolis, Webb’s work has taken him from the New Mexican mesas featured in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, to the Zodiac boat off the coast of Greenland where he covered Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go Bernadette? “I’m usually on set 100 percent of the time because it’s the only way to get the pictures I want,” says Webb, who is often shooting right alongside favorite directors like Noah Baumbach, Ben Stiller, and Paul Thomas Anderson. “My goal is to get great pictures while also being out of the way, and not apparent to the actors.”

While Webb admits he’s got a love/hate relationship with Instagram (where "take fewer selfies" is part of his bio), he’s also inspired by the way digital technology has put good cameras in everyone’s hands. “We’re seeing so many new perspectives, which I love. But ultimately photos have to speak for themselves,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what the medium, or camera, or delivery system is–if the image doesn’t move you, it doesn’t move you.”