Ralph Gibson

It has never been easy to typecast American photographer Ralph Gibson; he is a musician, photographer and book artist. As a performer Gibson’s music collaborations have included Leonard Cohen’s early album New Skin for Old Ceremony, recorded in New York in 1974, and Lou Reed on Red Shirley. He is currently in the process of composing a sound and image piece for an homage to Charles Ives called Surface to Surface to be presented at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in April 2015. These sound and visual experiments, with projected images, are surreal juxtapositions, sometimes an image within another—the beat is in the image and vice versa. If there is a sense of the set-up, it is ongoing and cinematic in the micro-climate that is Gibson’s photo aesthetic. He seizes the unfamiliar and builds a vocabulary with an eclectic, sharp-contrast style. It’s a way of working with visuals and they become instants in a larger narrative on contemporaneity. On the west coast as a youth Gibson wandered the sets of Alfred Hitchcock’s films where his father worked as an assistant, and the influence is evident.

This survey of some 50 photographs, his first in over 30 years in Canada, shows Gibson’s move away from documentary photography (which he had learned as assistant to Dorothea Lange in 1962) to the sense of 1970s photography as a graphic, gritty and light infused medium. Lange had encouraged him to follow his own muse, and he did. An interiority, interpreting what is there, a sense of an inner instantaneous journey permeates Gibson’s art. He brings it to another level as photo object. As he says, “I very much enjoy the language of shapes in all things. I like the way those shapes correspond and interact and communicate amongst themselves.” With a wonderful choice of iconic images, the Galerie Samuel Lallouz exhibition makes evident Gibson’s eye for the graceful lines, shadows and textures of the body and for the strange scenes and contrasts that are ordinary moments in life. He seizes the unfamiliar and constructs a vocabulary out of what is odd and yet so everyday, building visual contrast into a dialogue on our state(s) of being. Gibson cites the Italian painter de Chirico as an influence, but it could just as easily have been Joseph Cornell’s magic box assemblages.

For Gibson, the book became an art form. Lustrum Press, which he founded in 1969, made him part of the vernacular of contemporary American photography. A trio of his books, The Somnambulist, 1970, followed by Deja-Vu, 1973, and Days at Sea, 1975, brought photographic Surrealism back into art world consciousness. As post-Gutenberg printed experiments, they were sublime expressions of the continuity that books embody. Neither illustration nor data, Gibson’s art books raise the bar on how space is used on each page and in the play between image and text.

Gibson’s preferred camera has been the Leica, so much so that Leica has given a new digital camera Ralph Gibson’s name. He still does not crop images, and accepts what is revealed—as “it” exists. Other sources feed his approach to photography. Once it was jazz, but the influences are broader now and music compositions merge with images and sound scores. Gibson commented when we talked at his New York studio that countries of the future like Brazil are now a source for his work, finding in the past a repertoire that offered little that interested him. “The dynamic there is in the here and now,” he told me.

There is an enigmatic feel for structures, for the shape of things, and a sense that the image supersedes the object in Ralph Gibson’s poetic vision. He goes in between language, in between words, and the instantaneous way images design our imagination. With tonality and resonance Ralph Gibson’s world is somehow archaic in its contemporaneity, Nefertiti’s ghost is in all this…somewhere. ❚

Ralph Gibson was exhibited at Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal, from November 20, 2014 to January 15, 2015.

John K Grande is a Montreal-based curator, poet and arts writer. He is the author of Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream (Pari Publishing, Italy). He recently curated “Earth Art 2014” at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario and will be curating an international sculpture show in Italy in spring 2015.