Ralph Gibson studied photography while in the US Navy and then at the San Francisco Art Institute. He began his professional career as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and went on to work with Robert Frank on two films. Gibson has maintained a lifelong fascination with books and book-making. Since the appearance in 1970 of The Somnambulist, his work has been steadily impelled towards the printed page. His photographs are included in over one hundred and fifty museum collections around the world, and have appeared in hundreds of one man exhibitions.
Gibson's awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Lucie Lifetime Award and the Silver Plumb Award. He is an Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland and Ohio Wesleyan University.
In 2010 he collaborated with Lou Reed on the film Red Shirley which has been screened in film festivals throughout Europe and North America.
He has maintained a relationship to the guitar since his earliest teens. Recently Gibson has incorporated his photographs and musical compositions into film and live performances. He has performed Typography and One Way with the wind instrumentalist Jon Gibson at Roulette and the Stone in New York which resutlted in a Mask, a book and concert piece premiered in Fall of 2011. In 2012 the High Museum of Art presented a retrospective of his work from the permanent collection. His recent publications include Passé Imparfait, a book of his early work dating from 1960-69, by Contrajour, France and for Fall 2012 Taschen will publish NUDE, a complete collection of his photographs of the figure dating from 1961-2012. His current exhibitions for Fall 2012 include CameraWerk, Berlin, Germany, Gallery 916, Tokyo, Japan and PointLight Gallery, Sydney, Australia.
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