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| Ralph Gibson's Ghosts in a Life of Dreams |
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by KimDotDammit - 29 Aug., 2007
Ralph Gibson's Ghosts in a Life of Dreamsby KimDotDammit Untitled, 1969. Gelatin silver print. My eight year old daughter first introduced me to the photographs of Ralph Gibson. We walked into the Center for Creative Photography. I was studying a Tina Modotti photograph when my daughter called to me, “Mom, I have to show you this.” She took me into the next room and showed me this photograph from Ralph Gibson’s The Somnambulist series. “This is my favorite photograph, Mom,” she told me. “It’s so spooky in a good way. Look how the hand looks like it’s floating and the shadow on the wall. It’s like a ghost, and the door is like a place in a dream.” I looked at the photo and was also blown away by its subtle haunted beauty. Then I looked at the rest of the photographs in the Gibson exhibit and realized how accurately my daughter summarized his work. His photography absolutely is a world inhabited by ghosts, a dream world lurking inside the concrete world. Baby's Hand with Guitar The people in Gibson’s photographs are not centered human forms who occupy the frame in classical statuesque solidity. They are not icons of physical humanity. They are people caught in shadow and fringes. They are fragmented through Gibson’s lens, and in the fragments we witness their spirit. Gibson does not capture people but ghostlike apparitions that move in and out of the margins like an ephemeral presence. They hover like spectres. Their heads disappear in shadow; their bodies are erased by the edges of the frame; and their hands reach into the space of the photographs like apparitions from an otherworldly place making contact with the solid world.
Man With Umbrella These pieces of humanity that peek out in fragments seem to be caught in a state of wonder, astonishment, and disconnect. There is a tension between the world humanity has created and the human occupation of that world. Things become more solid than people. Buildings and furniture become containers for some lingering spirit, and concrete reality -- streets, buildings, walls, chairs, boats, doors – seems much more solid than the people who move through and briefly occupy this world. Man Walking Out of Bathroom Yet these things and places are laden with the presence of the people who once occupied them. Empty spaces are haunted and weighted with an absence, yet filled with the anticipation of a return. Absence itself is the ghost and is more present than the presence which is fragmentary and temporal. It’s almost as if absence is the most permanent state of being. The ghostlike figures of people linger in the fringes or not at all, and all their spirit seems to be contained within the set and not the human form. Untitled, 1969. Gelatin silver print. When viewed in sequence the Gibson photos (particularly from The Somnambulist, Déjà Vu, and Days at Sea trilogy) play like a surreal film in stills, a recording of the unconscious. There is a narrative here, but it is up to the viewer to fill in the blanks, and those blanks are located inside the realm of dreams. No surprise the first in Gibson’s book trilogy is called The Somnambulist because in Gibson’s world, we are all sleepwalkers. Being human is itself a dream. We leave our traces in things – a chair, a candle, a pen, a book – yet somehow our invisible presence within these concrete things is much more substantial than the actual concrete presence. Untitled, 1974. Gelatin silver print. Gibson captures the lingering effects of life as we pass through it, the infinite presence we leave behind us. It is a marvel, an illusion, something just beyond our grasp yet we create a solid presence through our ephemeral state of absence. It is a presence that cannot be seen but felt. The whole has to be fractured to understand what lives inside it. We try to focus and understand with microscopes, telescopes, and glasses, but we must take our lenses off before we can see clearly. Gibson’s lens allows us to see beyond our lenses. He lets us take off our glasses and understand what is below the surface. We are but ghosts in a life of dreams. Untitled, 1972. Gelatin silver print. Some interesting facts about Ralph Gibson: * He studied with Dorothea Lang. Men Shaking Hands KimDotDammit (KDD) lives in Arizona and uses her journal as her writing project. "This is a place where I put my words. Sometimes it's about sex. Sometimes it's about my kid. It's about movies, poetry, art. It's about weird people I see. My garden. My house. My cats. My family. My life. It's my screen test. It's my trailer. I don't know what the fuck it is. It's mine though, and I pretty much limit the content to me. It's about me, by me, for me. It's narcissitic masturbation. It's My Big Experiment. It's whatever. But I love everyone who reads it."
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