Recommendations of the Editorial team
“I take pictures of what I can’t explain,” said Ralph Gibson. This means that the photographer almost soberly describes the program of his diverse series that have been created since the 1960s, which have not known visual genre boundaries, but have always been recorded with a Leica.
Files, portraits, still lifes – all of them are under the desire to find a new categories of seeing. His photos seem improvised, concentrated, physically, puzzling. Since the 1970s he has been staging everyday details, the female silhouette and the shadow case in things in a way that swing between eroticism and abstraction, surrealism and purism, intimacy and distance.
Gibson’s pictures seem to be cut – as if they were just frames of a film. In his trilogy “The Somnambulist” (1970), “Déjà-Vu” (1973) and “Days at Sea” (1974), he relies on close-ups, hard contrasts and mysterious excerpts without explanation. He photographs parts – a shoulder, a hand, a wave, a door – and leaves the viewer the assembly.
Ralph Gibson staged hints
A central topic in Gibson’s work is the female body. However, he was never concerned with classic nude photography. The visual idea counts much more. His images of women are reduced and they leave it with hints. They do not show the woman, they slowly feel each other. That also seems charged with desire.
This fragmentary eroticism made him the forerunner of an imagery, as it became more and more present in fashion and music photography of the 80s and 90s. You can feel Gibson in the cover artwork of Depeche Mode, in Madonna videos of the Erotica phase, in black and white photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino or in Ellen from Unwerth.
Ralp Gibson started as an assistant at Dorothea Lange in 1960 and also worked for Robert Frank. Previously, he had started photography during his service in the US Navy. His attempt to gain a foothold in New York is successful. Here he opens his own studio and made a career. Gibson, as one of the first photographers with his own Lustrum-Press publications, brought his pictures a public beyond galleries.
The pocket publisher now presents in a retrospective band (Ralph Gibson. Photographs 1960-2024. Hardcover, 552 pages, 60 euros) With many detailed explanations of the photos, the largest selection of his work available in book form so far.
