Experimentation moves people forward and makes them unique, in art there are new processes and new perspectives that bring a medium forward in time; even though it may seem entirely tangental to the worlds of science and other progress. Ralph Gibson is an excellent example of this experimental effect, personally his use of a traditional rangefinder with more intimate human forms of light and shadow show that he is aware of how different physical principals excite our aesthetic tastes. Though as it’s easy to see, the man himself had rather expensive tastes – apparently insisting on Leica’s brand name glass so much that they even made a custom edition Monochrome camera for him; but when you’re working with the best I guess it’s easier to try and take photos with vast contrast like you see here.
The thing that’s significant about this image isn’t the nude figure portrayed, as that would be considered more of a classical form; instead it is the allusion to scientific progress being made at the time – some of which was being done in the Light Engineering building here on campus. I had gone there once and found an old lab for experimenting with moiré imagery which in a similar manner projected lines around the contours of an object to better comprehend it in three dimensional space. It’s interesting to point out that this technology made it possible to spot the development of breast cancer before it was noticeable externally – and here we see an artistic image of a woman’s body being similarly interpolated. I have no idea if the effect was intensional or not, but it certainly is interesting to hypothesize.
Ralph Gibson: Striped nude, 1981