Ralph Gibson

A thunder clap. A lightening flash. A Navy ship rolls across the Atlantic, and while standing watch in the middle of the night, an 18 year-old Navy recruit confirms his calling: to take photographs.
Ralph Gibson's early exposure to photography-as a Navy recruit, as an art student and then under the tutelage of legendary photographers Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank-established him as a photojournalist. But Gibson soon realized that the stories he wanted to tell with photography were not journalistic chronicles but narratives about personal perspective
Every picture tells a story, but the story that Gibson strives to tell in each photograph is not confined to the action or the depiction within a frame. "I came to realize that the subject of my photographs would be the moment of my personal perception," Gibson says. "My perceptive act is the subject of my photographs." In this way, each photograph's composition-the light, the lines, the frame-becomes a story of how that photographer perceives his subject. In turn, the viewer forms his own narrative as he or she contrasts his own perspective with the photographer's.
Obliged to choose his most iconic photograph, Gibson admits, "It would probably be the portrait I took of a priest." At first glance, it's a simple, cropped black-and-white portrait, but the photograph's subject extends far beyond the frame. Gibson talks about the portrait this way, "It's rigid, it's geometrical. It has all my diagonals. It has my compositional structure." For the viewer, there's a narrative of transformation being communicated, a story that's interpreted and translated by the photographer. Color has been turned black-and-white, three-dimensional space has been flattened, and lines have been extended and compressed. "I was aware of every square inch in this picture when I made it," Gibson says.
Gibson's collaboration with LM100 has allowed him to interact with innovators and masters in disciplines beyond photography. "Le Méridien is providing a proscenium, a stage, a platform in which ideas can play out to a much larger audience." He hopes that guests at Le Méridien will join this exchange in order find a new perspective, perhaps even with a camera in hand.
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