The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is exhibiting “Quartet: Photographs by Ralph Gibson” through Jan. 22. The show surveys Gibson’s prolific career — presenting both his iconic and lesser-known photographs together within the thematic contexts of their original creations.
On display are 12 groups of prints, gathered from the High’s permanent collection to represent a wide array of conceptual series he has developed and published during five decades.
Gibson’s first important body of work, “The Somnambulist,” was published in 1970, followed shortly thereafter by “Deja-Vu” in 1972 and “Days at Sea” in 1974. These three series were responsible for bringing the photographer his first serious acclaim as an artist. Critic A.D. Coleman proclaimed that Gibson seemed to have emerged into the art world “full-fledged,” with photographs that were “absolutely distinctive and unmistakably his.” Documenting everyday occurrences in disorienting, surreal and visual evocative ways, these three series set the stylistic and conceptual direction that his work would follow for years to come.
As an occasional child actor and the son of an assistant director for Warner Bros. Studios during the 1940s and 1950s, Gibson was born and raised around film. He was exposed to the era’s stylistic tendencies toward strong lighting and Alfred Hitchcock’s aesthetic style. But it was not until he served in the U.S. Navy during the 1950s that he became a practicing photographer himself. He learned solid technical skills at the Navy’s photography school in Pensacola, Fla., and perfected them as a lab manager aboard a Navy vessel in the North Atlantic. While attending the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1960s, his creative eye was honed as he assisted photographers Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank.
He has worked exclusively with the Leica camera for almost 50 years.