This interview was originally featured in Issue No. 4 – Connections.

ANDREA BLANCH: What is your background?

RALPH GIBSON: I grew up in Los Angeles in the ‘40s and ‘50s. My father worked at Warner Brothers. He was Assistant to Alfred Hitchcock and I’ve been in a lot of movies as an extra. I was sixteen when my parents separated, and I went into the Navy. The Navy is where I learned photography and I took it very seriously. At 21 I left the army and went very briefly to the San Francisco Art Institute. Learningphotography in the navy gave me an extremely strong technical background. There, it was all about resolution and sharpness and grey scale.

My first real break came working in San Francisco as an assistant to Dorothea Lang. Being with her in the dark room all day I learned a tremendous amount about content. This was in the 1960s and America is just raging across the horizon…Many of my generation were totally taken by it. I wanted to be a photojournalist and that’s what I did…I bought a trench coat and came to NY. But it was not for me.

ANDREA: Why didn’t you like it?

RALPH: I didn’t like somebody telling me what to photograph and then subsequently determining whether or not it was a good photograph. Usually, their ideas were quite stupid. My own ideas were stupid enough, but at least they were mine.

ANDREA: What was your next call?

RALPH: After I dropped out of my photojournalism job I started working with Robert Frank on some of his films. Like working with Dorothea, working with him impressed upon me the incredible importance of having your own theme and not emulating somebody else’s ideas as your own. It was a very productive period and in 1978, I made a book called Somnambulist. Before publishing it I owed 3 months rent for my apartment in Chelsea and I had left two of my three Leicas in pawn. After publishing the book I became recognized immediately – in a very small field – but around the world. I felt I had arrived. Since then, I just do my own projects. I would shoot a job every five or ten years if I was really interested in it.

ANDREA: Looking at your photography, spontaneity is not what comes to mind. Is this a remnant of your photojournalistic days?

RALPH: Well, there is always an act of discovery. It could be on the street, or it could be in the studio, or when I’m photographing the news. The subject might be predetermined, but I never know what the results are going to be. I have to really start looking through the viewfinder. I’m not very interested in the “good luck” sort of photograph. I want to be fully conscious of my work. I want to take all the credit or all the blame for the picture.

AB: So how would you define your photography?

RG: I never thought about that. I always wanted to make photographs for myself and impress myself more than anybody else. I’m always in search for that feeling of knowing how to make a photograph that will interest me to look at. I spend an awful lot of time looking at my work. Anyway, photography has always been a very amorphous, broadly defined medium. Nobody has ever really pinpointed the Canon and said, “This is photography.” Tchaikovsky may have tried but the medium just moved too fast and it defied definition.

AB: Are there living photographers that you like?

RG: Definitely. I thought I knew Cindy Sherman’s work very well, and then I saw her incredible perspective at the MoMA and I found her even greater than I thought she was. I just saw an exhibition in Long Island by Adam Bartos and I congratulated him on the purely photographic look. I’m still in love with the medium itself. I’m still attracted towards the alchemy of light on silver suspended in gelatin.

AB: What interests you in photography?

RG: Staring power. I want the pictures to be looking at me. Essentially the pictures will recognize that low frequency that I yearned towards.

AB: What advice would you give to young photographers?

RG: Stay pure. It’s never been easy and it’s probably becoming harder. However when I was debuting in the field, there were barely any art galleries. The Witkin was barely open. Now there is a tremendous market for photography and the prices are astronomical. If you are very good you will make a career.

AB: You don’t have any curiosity at all experimenting with the digital technology in our phones?

RG: One thing to be said about digital technology is that it has this incredible ability to transfer information. With photography I am not interested in transferring, but rather transcending the object. I am interested in photography from the inside out. I use HD video for the films I do. I’m not against it. Believe me, if I thought it was good for my photography, I would use it. I believe that a person, who is probably still in the womb, will one day pop out a digital image that will actually tell me what digital is all about.

AB: Do you go to art history for inspiration?

RG: Oh, absolutely. Look at all the books I’m reading right now. I’m deep into Kline. I exhausted my photographic inspiration in the early stages, and now I hunt the art museums and galleries of the world.

AB: So nudes are one more avenue to broaden your vocabulary?

RG: I’ve done them for all different reasons. The first one was of the first girl I lived with in 1961. You see, photography is not about how. It’s about what. And when the subject is given, like a nude, then you have to work extra hard. And in a 400 page book of nudes, when you move from one page to the next, I better provide for something to really captivate you. It is the oldest subject – the Willendorf Venus from 24000 BC. Therein lies the creative challenge. I wrote in my preface that we like to star into the psychological mirror of the human body. And that’s one of my many subjects comprising 20% of my overall work.

AB: What is your next project?

RG: I have several ones. For years I’ve been photographing in color around Manhattan for a project called the Gotham Chronicles. It’s very streety but abstract. And color is a challenge because it’s not as good as black and white. Reality exists in 100% scale. It has colors. So in black and white you reduce reality and are two steps away from it.

AB: Do you strive to capture perfection or imperfection?

RG: The concept of perfection and imperfection is only interesting to the extent that the photography is better than the photographer. I would say the photographer is imperfect and s/he strives towards perfection.

AB: You have such an understanding of the art.

RG: I am not a photographer. I am something through which photography speaks, like the radio that plays the music. I know that I’m very fortunate.