How does the mind influence the mind? The mind cannot function without memory. And memory is just the mind aware of itself. So how do images tell us how we see and who we are?

Ralph Gibson is one of the most interesting American photographers of our time. His international renown is based on his work, which is shown and collected by some of the world’s leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Creative Center for Photography in Tucson, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.

Gibson’s works reveal a meticulous aesthetic and visual territory edging on the surreal. His recent books include his memoir Self Exposure, Sacred Land: Israel before and after Time, and Secret of Light, which accompanied his exhibition at the Deichtorhallen House of Photography in Hamburg. He is a Leica Hall of Fame Inductee and has been awarded the French Legion of Honor. In 2022, The Gibson | Goeun Museum of Photography devoted to his work opened in Busan, South Korea.

"I am more interested now in writing on aesthetics from a theoretical basis. I find I'm able to express certain things that I'd always wondered about on a purely intuitive level. And so that's the nature of my writings. I have a book in the works entitled Theorem, which picks up from that series that you're familiar with, the vertical horizon and nature object things I did after that. They're much more based on theory of perception, theory of socially defined shapes, theory of cultural applications to how we perceive. And, you see, I can express le ciel. I can express the sky: the two different languages, same sky, slightly different.

There is a difference when you say il cielo or the sky in Italiano. You see it? The emphasis, the sound of the word produces a response that impacts our perception of the object being described. So if the word sounds slightly different, the object is going to shift in an interesting way, it doesn't have to be positive or negative. 

It's just always interesting to me how think of it, which gets us closer to a musical construct. Because musical is nothing. Music is purely abstract sound capable of defining the undefinable. And it also happens to be a language that's universally spoken. We could play certain pieces of music in any society in the world and it would be to some extent or another perceived, understood. I recently read that there's never been a people that didn't have music. And that can be a very small group of people. It doesn't have to be a gigantic society like Asian or Caucasian. It could be a small splinter group somewhere."

www.ralphgibson.com
www.deichtorhallen.de/en/ausstellung/ralph-gibson
www.gibsongoeunmuseum.com

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