Ralph Gibson

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Ralph Gibson

Ralph Gibson (born January 16, 1939 in Los Angeles , California ) is an American photographer .

biography

Ralph Gibson was an extra in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray as a student . He came to photography through military service in the American Navy when he attended the Naval School of Photography in Pensacola. He studied from 1956 - 1962 at the San Francisco Art Institute photography and became assistant to Dorothea Lange . In 1969 Gibson moved from the West Coast to New York . Here he worked with Robert Frank on the film Me and my Brother . In the same year he founded his own publishing house, Lustrum Press , together with photographer friendsbecause none of the established publishing houses wanted to publish the work. Gibson turned away from documentary photography around 1970 . He cultivated an approach to the objects in increasingly high-contrast images in order to bring about a form of abstraction that excluded everything that did not directly belong to the focused object. Ralph Gibson recently became a founding member of the LM100 artist group, an advisory group to the luxury hotel brand Le Méridien Hotels . Among other things, he designed the 'Transitional Portal' in Le Méridien Beach Plaza Monte Carlo.

plant

Ralph Gibson cultivated the surreal - metaphysical aspect in his photographic works in the 1960s , which are mainly designed in coarse-grained black and white material . In one of his first works, The Somnambulist , he leads the viewer on a metaphysical and dreamlike journey, which he achieves with deliberately chosen excerpts. Gibson carefully tells the story of a somnambulist (sleepwalker). Many of the motifs in this photo book were found in poster collections. Ralph Gibson prefers to use a Leica rangefinder camera with a 50 mm lens that roughly corresponds to the normal perspective of the human eye. In his earlier works he used extreme wide-angle lenses to achieve dramatic effects through spatial and perspective distortions. He also solarized his earlier works in the darkroom . Later he relied more on the square format and calculated how the human eye would see a certain image section from a certain distance ( Quadrants series 1975). In his later work (for example in his France series) Gibson increasingly used color material.

The photograph of a solarized hand in the crack of an open door (from The Somnambulist ) was to become the photographer's best-known and most widely published motif (e.g. on the inside cover of the band Joy Division ).

1997, he was from the Ohio Wesleyan University of Doctor of Fine Arts awarded.

Publications (selection)

  • The Somnambulist Lustrum Press, 1970; 1st part of the trilogy
  • Déjà-Vu Lustrum Press, 1973, 2nd part of the trilogy
  • Days at Sea Lustrum Press, 1975, part 3 of the trilogy
  • Syntax (1983)
  • Tropism (1987)
  • L'Anonyme (1987)
  • L'Histoire de France (1991), foreword by Marguerite Duras.
  • State of the Ax: Guitar Masters in Photographs and Words (2008), Museum Fine Arts Houston. Foreword by Anne Wilkes Tucker; Introduction by Les Paul.
  • Gluggengligen: Focus Like a Pro

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gibson, Ralph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Los Angeles , California