“La vita è bella,” say the Italians, “life is beautiful.” Indeed, it is. When peering into an Alex Webb photograph, you’d be hard-pressed to miss the beauty in the world. Vibrant, saturated colors, scenes caught mid-motion, and wide, toothy grins spread across each frame, capturing joy and spontaneity in life’s everyday happenings. His latest body of work, “Pleasure Makes Us Human,” will be featured in the 2026 Lavazza Calendar, as was revealed at Miami Art Basel this week.

“Pleasure Makes Us Human” is a collection that uncovers the daily pleasures of Italian life. Consisting of 12 images—one for each month of the year—each photograph represents one aspect of the ‘dolce vita,’ or the pleasurable Italian life. It’s this pleasure, that of meeting, laughing, basking in the sunlight, a brief moment of solitude, that binds each member of the human race together. “Pleasure Makes Us Human” also features the eponymous cups and tazzine in the Lavazza Calendar, depicting each subject in a state so many of us frequent daily: a quotidian prayer to the altar of coffee.

According to Lavazza, coffee, like art, bridges people of all kinds together. As this year’s theme makes clear, the ritual of coffee becomes more than a morning habit—it’s a meeting point, a cultural glue, a moment of recognition between strangers and friends alike. Through Webb’s lens, the humble act of sipping espresso transforms into a visual language of togetherness, underscoring Lavazza’s belief that shared pleasures, no matter how small, ripple outward into something universal.

The Lavazza Calendar has featured a long list of acclaimed and influential artists over the past three decades—Helmut Newton, Steve McCurry, Annie Leibovitz, and Alex Prager come to mind—placing Alex Webb among a series of greats. In continuing the legacy, “Pleasure Makes Us Human” is refreshing, bright, and full of joy. Read further for our conversation with Webb.

The title “Pleasure Makes Us Human” is a bold, almost philosophical claim—what stories does the 2026 calendar hope to tell about what it means to be human today?

I see this project specifically in the context of Italian culture—from food to architecture to film and the other arts—and its sense of the ease and pleasure of being alive and its embrace of being human.

Your photographs often capture fleeting, layered moments that feel almost choreographed, fortuitously. How do you preserve that spontaneity and freedom while working within the structure of the calendar?

While photographing, I try to leave ample room for serendipity, which I find helps bring the scenes to life.

The Lavazza Calendar has a long lineage of photographers who have each mirrored shifting cultural conversation. What does it mean to contribute to that legacy? Did any previous calendar editions particularly inspire you?

I was delighted that Lavazza asked me to contribute to this rich legacy, which includes visions as diverse as Alex Prager, Elliott Erwitt, Annie Leibovitz, Erwin Olaf, Martine Franck, and Ferdinando Scianna. It’s an honor to be among such esteemed company.

Your work is painted beautifully with vibrant colors that are almost impossible to ignore. Do the colors you capture arrive with the scene itself, or are they a deliberate thread woven in to convey certain feelings or meanings?

I work intuitively, finding and exploring color in the world. I feel the light, the color, as well as the emotional tenor of color.

When you’re not behind the camera, what inspires you visually?

I’m inspired by the lyrical photographs of my wife and creative partner, the photographer and poet Rebecca Norris Webb. I’m currently helping her sequence her upcoming book of 30 years of her color photographs, called Glimmerings.