Ralph Gibson (b. January 16, 1939, Los Angeles, California) is an American art photographer best known for his photographic books. His images often incorporate fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition.
Ralph Gibson studied photography while in the US Navy and then at the San Francisco Art Institute. He began his professional career as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and went on to work with Robert Frank on two films. Gibson has maintained a lifelong fascination with books and book-making. Since the appearance in 1970 of THE SOMNAMBULIST, his work has been steadily impelled towards the printed page. To date he has produced over 40 monographs, his most current projects being "State of the Axe" published by Yale University Press in Fall of 2008 and "NUDE" by Taschen (2009). His photographs are included in over one hundred and fifty museum collections around the world, and have appeared in hundreds of exhibitions.
Gibson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1975, 1986), a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (D.A.A.D.) Exchange, Berlin (1977), a New York State Council of the Arts (C.A.P.S.) fellowship (1977), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985).
He was decorated as an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1986) and appointed, Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2005) by the French government.
His awards include: Leica Medal of Excellence Award (1988), "150 Years of Photography" Award, Photographic Society of Japan (1989), a Grande Medaille de la Ville d'Arles (1994) and the Lucie Award for life time achievement (2008).
Gibson also received an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Maryland (1991), and a second honorary doctorate from the Ohio Wesleyan University (1998).
He has worked exclusively with the Leica for almost 50 years.
Gibson currently lives in New York and travels frequently to Europe and Brazil.
(wikipedia)
An Interview with Ralph Gibson
By Chris Maher and Larry Berman
19 June 2001
Featured in the February 2002 issue of Shutterbug Magazine
Chris/Larry: Let us begin with a question about your vision. Your work has an extraordinary balance in it, a certain kind of energy to it. Can you tell us about your state of mind when you are shooting?
Ralph: Well, for the longest time I have known that photography for me is not directly linked to an external event. For example if I say that tomorrow there’s going to be an execution at 12 o’clock. You get there, we can all win a Pulitzer prize. If you get there at 12:01 you miss your shot, as it were. So, what I wanted to do, is be able to make my perception of anything become the subject itself. And for this reason I’ve attempted to take pictures of simple things, you know, like a cardboard box, or a chair, or a spoon. Very humble objects. I’m not terribly drawn towards the epic event. I’d like to make something totally insignificant into an object of importance, by virtue of how photography works.
Chris/Larry: How much of your shooting is actually planned? How much is spontaneous? How much do you pre-conceptualize what you’re going to get versus just working with the subject and the light and just responding to it?
Ralph: I know an image when I see it, but I never know what my next photograph is really going to be, necessarily, unless I’m working on a project. I have several projects currently under way. I’m working on Berlin at night on a thing called “I am the Night”. I’m also working on a project for Gibson Guitars entitled “Light Strings” with my friend the guitarist Andy Summers. This will be a book and a traveling exhibition. So, in a case of something like that I know what the subject matter will be. Or when I’m doing nudes for example, I know that tomorrow at 3:00 a model is coming to the studio. However, I’ve recently been invited by the Mayor of Strasbourg in Alsace to come this fall to make twenty photographs of the area. This will mean that I’ll be entirely at large, as they say. I’ll just be drifting around and I will respond to what I think and feel, and one picture will inform my next one, and I will follow the tone. The same thing as when I lay out a book. I make a couple of double page spreads that seem to have a certain kind of emotional tone, which I then follow in subsequent spreads.
Chris/Larry: When you’re walking around shooting, say, twenty pictures of an area, what kind of equipment do you bring with you? What is the technology you use to capture your images?
Ralph: It’s very simple. I carry two Leica M’s. I have two M6’s and I usually take three lenses. A 35, 50, and 90. And one body has color, one body has black and white. I might take a 135 in the case of Alsace because they’ll probably be some landscapes and I’ll want to flatten them. So I will use the long lens. But I really believe that the problem for me is for me to perceive something clearly, and it doesn’t matter where I am. I’ve been in Japan, I’ve been all over the world and I come back with the same photographs (laughs). It appears that wherever I go I tend to bring my vision with me.
Chris/Larry: You do capture an energy that is unique to the area. Like in your pictures in Japan, there was a certain energy that came through those, which I thought was a bit different, than in your European work.
Ralph: When I think of energy I think more in terms of composition, a certain tension on the surface of the image. I’m very much the formalist in photography. I’ll take a picture of anything in an attempt to compose it within the proportions of the golden means (the 24x36mm proportion) just to see if I can compose it perfectly. And I think that the energy to which you refer to has more to do with these issues.
Chris/Larry: When you use Leica rangefinders, is there a different type of visualization because the way the camera’s viewfinder is designed? When you shoot do you crop at all, or is it all in that frame?
Ralph: I have spent forty years working with the Leica rangefinder. The rangefinder enables one to see what’s outside of the frame as well as what’s inside of the frame. You make a decision predicated on the presence and/or the absence of various aspects of the subject. With a reflex, the camera determines what is seen, and half the time it's out of focus. One could follow a reflex around the world and focus it from time to time until it came across a picture. With a rangefinder you see something, you make the exposure and you continue to look at what you’re seeing. The rangefinder is ideally matched to the perceptive act, the personal act of perception. I only use a reflex for extreme close-ups.
Chris/Larry: You have a very tight, formal kind of design to your work. Do you ever use a tripod?
Ralph: I rarely use a tripod, unless I’m in the studio with a long lens shooting a nude with a long exposure. I rarely use a tripod and I rarely crop. And even if I did, I wouldn’t admit it (laughs).
Chris/Larry: Well, when you’re actually shooting, do you go through a lot of film, or are you very conservative in the way in which you make your exposures?
Ralph: I don’t bracket, if that’s what you mean. I’ve discovered that when I was shooting Kodachrome or something that I’d have to bracket because of the extremely short latitude of material. But now, with these very sophisticated color negative materials, they are much more forgiving. There’s a meter inside the Leica. I use it in the broadest most general sense of the word. I usually center weight it and I put it on whatever color I consider to be the most important part of the subject in the photograph. In black and white I hardly pay any attention to it at all.
Chris/Larry: I was thinking of the dynamic of working with the subject. You work with shadows in an incredibly dynamic way. Shadows are very critical to the power of your pieces. Do you play with the shadow by movement and changing….
Ralph: For example if you’re going to make a drawing, you take a paper and a pencil and add lines, add marks, until you finish your drawing. It's additive. When I make a photograph, I move in closer and I take things away, and I take things away, until I get everything out of the frame except what I want. Therefore my process is considered subtractive. Now part of this subtraction has to do with casting things into deep shadow. I eliminate a lot of unwanted material, activity into the shadow area. And in so doing, create a shape. Instead of just being a variation on light, for me shadows become cut forms, they become shapes. And I discovered this by photographing primarily in bright sun and exposing for highlights, which is pretty easy to do. Most people struggle to get detail into their shadows. I was never interested in that kind of photographic expression particularly.
Chris/Larry: Your work really takes advantage of the 35mm film dynamic range, with its characteristic graininess and tonality. How has the changing of materials, the newer films with finer grain, effected you? Have you pretty much stayed with the one film and developer combination?
Ralph: I’ve used Rodinal since 1961. I use Tri-x almost exclusively but occasionally, sometimes I get in the mood to use Fuji 400. But either one is the same to me. And for my night work, I’ve been very happily working with Fuji Neopan 1600. But they’re all souped in Rodinal. I develop all my own film myself, personally. And I also base the fact that I develop my film personally means that there’s going to be certain irregularities in my agitation. And I have discovered that, in these irregularities there is some creative input. I don’t want my film to be developed too well, too cleanly, too smoothly. I don’t want that slick look. I’ve had a life long relationship with grain. You know I originally started out as a photojournalist when I was young. I’ve always felt that grain gave texture both to cinema, as well as photography. I’ve used it for any number of reasons for the entire length of my career. It’s almost harder to get a grainy image nowadays than it is to get the shot.
