Ralph Gibson
American, 1939 -
Gibson was born in 1939 in Los Angeles and grew up in Hollywood. He was thrown out of his house and into the military at age 16, where he flunked out of the Navy’s photography school. He was allowed to return after promising to clean the latrine for six weeks, marking the end of his formal training in photography. Eventually, he apprenticed with Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank. Gibson’s own photographs are formal studies of shadow and light, as well as images that explore a certain subject or theme. Gibson has compared his photographs to objects, making something new-an abstraction made real. Gibson’s photography can be found in many books, most published by his own Lustrum Press, founded in 1969.
