RALPH GIBSON - Award-winning Photographer - Leica Hall of Fame Inductee

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 believe that AI will be an incredibly useful tool. Humanity has endured primarily because of its inherent characteristics. I see things like NFTs and AI and Spotify and file sharing, and there was a time when I moved to New York where I could drift through the empty museum galleries of the moment, and have my epiphanies. Now you go to the same museum, it's like the Tokyo subway. You're, you know, it's a bunch of sardines. That's what's happening because there are too many people in the world for the delivery system to any longer be affected. Museums are delivery systems. We're moving into a world of the private museum now because the great collectors are building their own museums.

I am happy to report since I've seen you, I have a museum in South Korea in my name. So, you know, I'm funneling, channeling, putting hundreds and hundreds of prints into this museum in Busan in an attempt to personalize the situation, but by the time you've got eight billion people living on the planet Earth for a hundred years, which I plan to do. There's a lot of people like me. We know that people are living longer now thanks to medicine and nutrition. 

I do tend to think that with file sharing, more people are listening to more music than ever before. You would have previously had to put a Tower Records on every street corner in order to effectively distribute that much music. Now, with NFTs, obviously, I, as the artist, as the audience spreads for a work of art quite often the content goes down. You could have a photograph and sell the original print and have 100 percent of your attention, or it could be reproduced on the cover of the New York Times at 72 dpi, 3 by 4 inches, and you'd get some of it, but you wouldn't get the whole thing, but a million people would see it. Now with the digital situation, working digitally, if the image stays in that digital space permanently, the only real shortcoming is the excessively bright, heavy saturated screen on your computer that tends to exaggerate things a bit."

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

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