A Nonlinear Way of Being The Photographs of Ralph Gibson
by A. D. Coleman
“To think visually is a . . . nonlinear way of being.”
— Ralph Gibson, in an interview with Bob Bishop, November 1988
The generation of American photographers that came of age professionally as the 1970s opened emerged in a creative environment for all the arts that had undergone a decade of transformative liberation during their adolescence and early adulthood. Literature, film, music, dance, the other visual arts, had all exploded in various ways during the Sixties in the States (and, indeed, throughout much of the west). Old forms and styles had become transformed or been transcended. The range of content and subject matter in all media had broadened enormously. Taboos had been violated consistently and willfully. In effect, the rules — however artists and their audiences had understood them in any given medium — had somehow gotten suspended, discarded, rewritten, and were seen as subject to further revision as necessary.
Arriving in New York from his native California at the beginning of the 1970s, photographer Ralph Gibson quickly became a force with which to reckon. Gibson had a four-fold influence on the field that helped to shape that decade, and the next, and still reverberates today.
First and foremost, there was the impact of his images themselves, distinctive in their graphic clarity, with high contrast and visible grain (the consequence of his exposure, development, and printing strategies), amplified by their concentration on telling, resonant, and often ambiguous detail. Gibson’s gift for isolating small, charged gestures and fragments — a priest’s collar, the corner of a sheet of paper lifted from a tablecloth by a breeze — had even then a quality of the obsessive, a hallucinatory intensity, conveying a sense of the distilled essence of something extremely important and accessible to the eyes but beyond words, visual equivalents of what novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett called “the unnameable.”
To achieve this, Gibson created his own idiosyncratic synthesis of what he gleaned from his predecessors, which he refers to as a “visual signature.” In addition to drawing on aspects of the work of the two photographers with whom he’d apprenticed himself, Dorothea Lange in California and Robert Frank in New York, Gibson absorbed elements apparently derived from such disparate sources as Bill Brandt (England), Herbert List (Germany), Henri Cartier-Bresson (France). From a very different standpoint, Gibson adopted war photographer Robert Capa’s dictum, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Digesting all that and adding more, he emerged with his own readily recognizable voice.
The resulting imagery had a consistent tension that maintained an unusual balance between the intellectual (if we consider a deliberately heightened intensity of perceptual awareness as a feat of the intelligence) and the sensual, with a steady undercurrent of the erotic. Immediately identifiable, his crisp, taut frames implied stories and emotional states individually, an effect augmented by his insistence on presenting them in carefully sequenced suites in both publication and exhibition form. (Gibson once spoke of using the opportunity to organize his own exhibitions as a way of creating “a band of energy running along the walls.”)
Second, there was his understanding of the potent relationship between thoughtfully sequenced photographic images and the printed book as both a vehicle for imagery and an integral form in itself. Gibson began to produce books of his own work, beginning with the black & white trilogy The Somnambulist (1970), Déjà-Vu (1973), and Days at Sea (1975). In them he adroitly balanced the autonomy and power of individual images with the synergy generated by the juxtaposition of two images on facing pages, effectively working with the diptych as a basic building block and then using those pairings to construct deliberately unspecific, implied, yet sustained narrative constructions.
Though his own interests did not include the documentary or even the sociological to any extent, Gibson clearly found inspiration in the germinal book projects of the two photographers he’d chosen as mentors — Lange’s An American Exodus (1939, in collaboration with Paul Schuster Taylor) and Frank’s The Americans (1959). Though quite different from each other, each of these two works radically expanded the parameters of the conventional photography monograph while challenging the received definition of documentary photography in their own day.
These volumes, along with Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment (1952) and Wright Morris’s The Inhabitants (1946) and The Home Place (1948), provided Gibson with building blocks for a new vision of photography presented in extended form on the printed page. He’s also indicated that what he terms W. Eugene Smith’s “elliptical” style of picture editing in his essays — intuitive and poetic associations rather than literal and journalistic juxtapositions — also affected his own approach to that process. (Gibson didn’t at that time know some of the more experimental Japanese photography books of the 1950s and ’60s, such as those by Daidoh Moriyama and Eikoh Hosoe, that subsequently influenced his thinking about the photo book as a form.) Gibson’s books came out at the historic moment of the “artist’s book” movement in the west, and helped to touch off a flood of bookworks by photographers — often, like so many artist’s books, self-published — that expanded the definition of the photography book well beyond what commercial publishers of the time made available.
The experience of publishing and distributing his own monographs successfully led Gibson to his third area of influence on his field: collaboration with other photographers he respected on the publication of their books under the imprint he’d established, Lustrum Press. These books, with layout, design, text, and printing all done to the specifications of the photographers, included important first monographs by Larry Clark (Tulsa), Neal Slavin (Portugal), Mary Ellen Mark (Open Passport), and Danny Seymour (A Loud Song), as well as Robert Frank’s second major book, The Lines of My Hand, and other memorable titles. As integral statements, they demonstrated that the photo book could serve as the vehicle for highly individualized and widely varied ways of seeing. As a series, they embodied alternative and provocative answers to the question of how a photo book could be assembled. And, as a publishing venture, they proved that a market existed for photo books that treated the medium as a form of poetry and a mode of thought, with high production values and smaller press runs than commercial publishers generally considered.
Fourth, and finally, Gibson’s impact as a teacher should not get overlooked. Though never connected formally or long-term with any academic institution, Gibson taught widely through the 1970s and ’80s on the then-thriving international photo-workshop circuit — primarily across the U.S., in Canada, and throughout Europe. Hundreds of photographers passed through those short, intensive courses. As a result, Gibson influenced several generations of emerging photographers, not just with his image style but with his ideas about the making of photography books, and also with the example he set of a photographer surviving and eventually thriving by producing his own work to his own standards and making it available to his audiences in forms over which he exercised complete control.
The photo-workshop circuit has diminished considerably over the past two decades; in any case, Gibson largely left it behind some time ago. And while he occasionally lends his design and layout skills to projects by friends and colleagues, he no longer publishes works by others under his own imprint. (Indeed, Lustrum Press now exists in name only, not as an active publishing line.)
Instead, Gibson concentrates almost exclusively on his own work: the steady production of new images, and the evolution of exhibitions and books (usually conceived jointly) in which to incorporate them.
As a photographer, Gibson makes new negatives regularly — sometimes on the street, sometimes in the studio, sometimes in private circumstances. He works, as he always, exclusively with Leica 35mm. rangefinder cameras. He has not so much changed his “visual signature” over the decades as he has refined it; the continuity between the early work of the 1970s and the most recent resolved prints is evident in any juxtaposition. The move into color constitutes the most noticeable expansion of his vocabulary; he now carries cameras loaded with both types of film, choosing b&w or color as the spirit — and the visual occasion — moves him.
Gibson still develops all his own film himself, personally, and his prints are all made in the darkroom. As that implies, he hasn’t gone digital, and seems unlikely to do so. “Digital photography seems to excel in all those areas that I’m not interested in,” he said in 2001. “I’m interested in the alchemy of light on film and chemistry and silver. When I’m taking a photograph I imagine the light rays passing through my lens and penetrating the emulsion of my film. And when I’m developing my film I imagine the emulsion swelling and softening and the little particles of silver tarnishing.”
Digital imaging has come into play in Gibson’s workflow, however, through the usefulness of Photoshop and other such programs in the design and layout of his own books (and those on which he collaborates), of which we’ve seen a steady stream — more than 40 titles under his own name to date. Gibson has always been project-oriented, not so much in his making of exposures as in his organization of the resulting single images into complex, coherent wholes. That activity, in combination with his own stringent self-editing of his output, has yielded one of the most tightly redacted and precisely orchestrated bodies of work in the medium’s history.
Long ago, Gibson wrote, “The years of struggle are over. Now begin the years of struggle.” His cumulative oeuvre, and his continuing productivity, bear witness to the perpetual truth of that attitude.
生命的非线性存在 ——拉夫·吉布森的摄影
A. D.柯曼
“视觉化的思考是一种…非线性的生命存在方式。”
—— 摘自鲍勃·毕晓博1988年11月对拉夫·吉布森的采访
上世纪70年代，拉夫·吉布森从他的家乡加利福尼亚来到纽约,并迅速成为一股不可忽视的力量。他在摄影领域的影响直接帮助塑造了摄影发展史上几十年的时间，而且今天依然在回荡.
吉布森的照片具有很强的冲击力，有着独特的图形清晰度、高对比度和明显的颗粒（这也是由他控制曝光、显影和放大照片所产生的效果），这些特征在照片那倾诉般的、动感的并经常模棱两可的细节里得到集中扩大。吉布森有着掌控细小事物的天赋，孤独的事物、迷人的姿势和旁人无法抓住的碎片瞬间 — 牧师的衣领、桌上被风吹起的纸片，都在他的照片里显出迷人和梦幻的密度，传达出事物提纯后的重要本质，它双眼可及但却无以言表，这正是小说家、戏剧作家贝克特所称的“莫可名状”的视觉版本。
吉布森潜心研究他前辈的作品并创造了自己独特的视觉语言体系，他称之为他的“视觉签名”。他曾师从于加州的桃乐茜·芮基和纽约的罗伯特·弗兰克，同时也很显然从许多别的摄影师那里受到了影响，他们包括比尔·布兰特（英国），赫伯特·李斯特（德国）以及亨利·卡蒂埃·布列松（法国）。随着他不断地从前辈那里吸收营养，并不断地进步，他逐渐建立起了自己的鲜明风格。他的照片有一种不寻常的知性和感性之间的和谐张力，以及色情的暗涌，这使得他的作品几乎一眼便可辨认。那些干脆又紧凑的线条下所隐含的故事和情感主张本身就已经很强烈，而吉布森对出版物的编排和展览的布展也有自己的坚持，他很讲究一套照片出现的顺序，因此他的作品的冲击力变得更强。吉布森曾说过他利用组织自己展览的机会来创造出“在墙上奔跑的一股能量”的效果。
吉普森对照片排序和最终成书之间的关系有着深刻的理解。他认为斟酌出来的照片排序和成书之间是个强有力的整体，它们共同承载着视觉传达效果的重任。吉布森从编纂自己的黑白照片三部曲开始出书：《梦游》(1970年), 《似曾相识》(1973年) 和《海上的日子》(1975年).在书中，他巧妙地平衡对开页上图像的独立性，使它们组合产生另外一种效果。这样的照片配对制造了故意不特定的、暗示性的，然而却很强有力的叙事结构。吉布森的书的出版简直可以说是西方“艺术家之书”运动的划时代事件，并从此引发了摄影师出版摄影书的洪流.成功出版和发行自己专著的经验，是吉布森对摄影界的另一个重要影响
吉布森作为一名教师的影响也不容忽视。虽然从来没有正式或者长期在任何学术机构从事教学，吉布森曾在70年代广泛授课，然后在80年代的美国、加拿大和欧洲推动了摄影国际研讨会的繁荣。无数的从事摄影的人都曾参加过这些短期的密集课程。因此，吉布森给几代新兴摄影师的影响不只是他的图片的风格，更是他对摄影书籍制作的理念，也是作为一个摄影师如何生存、并因为坚持自己的标准和将已经掌握的标准传授给观众而成功的典范。
作为一个摄影师，吉布森通常拍负片。有时在大街上，有时在工作室，有时在其他的私密场合。他一直坚持使用徕卡35mm旁轴相机。在过去的几十年中，无论他怎样修正自己的作品，他几乎都没有更改过他的“视觉签名”。从70年代所延续下来的早期作品风格，以及最新的作品无不证明了这一点。而涉足彩色摄影使其更加丰富了自己的摄影语言。他现在会随时带着两种胶卷进行拍摄，根据自己的精神需求和视觉场景选择黑白或彩色胶卷。
吉布森如今仍然坚持自己亲手冲照片，而且他的照片几乎都是在暗房完成的。这就意味着他从未进行数码摄影创作，而且好像也根本不愿意这样做。“数码摄影几个卓越的方面都不是我所感兴趣的，”他曾在2001年说道，“让我着迷的是胶片的魔力、化学反应和银版。当我进行创作的时候，我会想象光线穿过了我的镜头，投射到有感光乳剂的胶片上；当我洗照片的时候，我会想象乳剂在膨胀、软化，那些细小的银色颗粒在产生奇妙的变化。”
很久以前，吉布森曾写道,“斗争岁月已经一去不复返了，接下来的岁月是要留给奋斗了。”他累积的全部作品，以及他经久不衰的战斗力，让他的态度得到见证，并成为了永恒的真理.