Ralph Gibson

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

Biography

Ralph Gibson came through the military service with the U.S. Navy to photography. He studied from 1956-1962 at the San Francisco Art Institute Photography and became an assistant to Dorothea Lange. 1969 Gibson moved from the West Coast to New York. Here he worked with Robert Frank in the film Me and my Brother. In the same year he founded - together with photographer friend - his own publishing Lustrum Press, because none of the established publishers wanted to publish the work. Gibson turned in 1970 by the documentary photography from. He cultivated an approach to the objects in increasingly high-contrast shots to cause a form of abstraction that everything did not rule directly related to the focused object. Recently, Ralph Gibson is a founding member of the artist group LM100, an advisory group of the luxury hotel brand Le Meridien hotels. Among other things, he designed the ' Transitional Portal' at Le Meridien Beach Plaza Monte Carlo.

Work

Ralph Gibson cultivated in the 1960s, the surreal and metaphysical aspect in his photographic works, which are designed primarily in coarse-grained black -and-white material. He leads the viewer in one of his first works The Somnambulist on a metaphysical as somnambulistic journey he made ​​with deliberately chosen excerpts. Wisely told Gibson the story of a somnambulist ( sleepwalker ). Many of the themes this photo band went into poster collections. Ralph Gibson served with fondness a Leica rangefinder camera with a 50 objective, which corresponds approximately to the normal perspective of the human eye. In the earlier work he used even extreme wide-angle lenses to achieve dramatic effects by spatial and perspective distortions. He also solarized his earlier works in the darkroom. Later, he put more on the square format and worked out how the human eye would see a particular image detail from a certain distance ( series Quadrants 1975). In his later work ( for example in France of his series) Gibson used increasingly color material.

The photograph of a solarized hand in the gap of an open door (from The Somnambulist ) should be the best-known and most publicized motive of the photographers ( and Others on the inside cover of the band Joy Division ).

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