**The Power of Self-Directed Creativity**

I remember the day I decided to take control of my creative process like it was yesterday. It was a moment that changed the course of my career forever. As an artist, I had always been driven to push boundaries and experiment with new techniques. But it wasn't until I realized that I had the power to make decisions about my own work that I truly felt free to express myself.

I recall the time when I received an assignment at MGM's annual report. My friend Bob Overby got me this opportunity, and I used the money to pay for the lithographer and printer. It was a turning point in my career, as it showed me that I could take control of my own work and produce something truly unique. From then on, I knew that I had the confidence to pursue my vision, no matter what others thought.

**The Importance of Taking Risks**

When you're an artist, there's always a risk involved in taking risks. But it's precisely this kind of risk-taking that can lead to true innovation and growth. In my case, moving from black and white to color was a bold move that some people didn't understand at first. They saw me as someone who had abandoned their roots and was trying to make a name for myself in a different medium. But I knew that it was the right decision.

I remember showing my work at Castelli, where I received some criticism for my early experiments with color. The show featured close-ups of tiles and brick walls, which were very geometric and minimalist. Some people didn't get it, but it taught me to move forward and explore new ideas. The Black Series, which followed, was a major breakthrough for me.

**The Value of Staying True to One's Muse**

As an artist, you have to stay true to your vision and listen to your inner voice. This can be difficult, especially when there are people who want to tell you what they think is right or wrong. But it's essential to remember that you're the one with the unique perspective and skillset.

I learned this lesson early on in my career. When I first started out, I was tempted to listen to others and compromise on my artistic vision. But as I gained more experience and confidence, I realized that I had a responsibility to stay true to myself. This meant embracing my muse and letting it guide me towards new and exciting ideas.

**The Power of Photography**

One of the most important things I've learned about photography is its ability to capture moments in time. Whether it's a beautiful landscape or an intimate portrait, photographs have the power to transport us to another world.

In my case, one of my most famous photographs, "Days at Sea," was inspired by my own erotic fantasies as a sailor. It's a photograph that explores the relationship between form and emotion, and its success can be attributed to my ability to push boundaries and experiment with new techniques.

**The Value of Experimentation**

Experimentation is an essential part of any creative process. As artists, we must always be willing to try new things and explore new ideas. This can lead to breakthroughs and innovations that might not have been possible if we had stuck to what was familiar.

In my case, experimenting with color led me to create some of my most iconic works. It forced me to think outside the box and push the boundaries of what was considered "acceptable" in photography. And it ultimately led to a deeper understanding of my own creative vision and voice.

**The Power of Self-Direction**

One of the most important things I've learned about art is the power of self-direction. When you're an artist, you have the ability to make decisions that will shape your career and influence your work. This can be both liberating and terrifying, but ultimately it's what allows us to truly express ourselves.

For me, taking control of my own creative process was a turning point in my career. It showed me that I had the power to create something truly unique and innovative, and it paved the way for some of my most iconic works. As artists, we must always be willing to take risks and push boundaries, but it's also essential to stay true to our vision and listen to our inner voice.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everyone i have something that i am really excited to share with you guys today this has been a long time in the making and many of you know that i have been working a lot with ralph gibson over the last few years i've talked about it a lot on this show i featured him on the show before about 2020 or so i had an opportunity to study with ralph as part of his advancing photographer workshop series i also did some bookmaking workshops he's somebody that i would consider not just a friend but a mentor he's somebody that i look up to with an immense amount of respect he is one of the greatest photographers of his generation an amazing career starting in the 1960s he was part of the new york scene he is still actively producing work today and he is an enormous inspiration and somebody that i look up to a great deal so ralph gibson has a new book that he has just completed called refractions 2. i've got an unbound preview copy i've read the whole thing it is just phenomenal this is really going to be exciting a couple months ago i had an opportunity to go up to exton pennsylvania which is right outside of philadelphia to go to the printer which is brilliant graphics whose ralph's is working with on this project and do some interviews and some behind the scenes footage and i'm really excited because i'm going to share the first part of that with you guys in this video and i want to extend a very warm thank you to leica for help making this project happen without their generosity and support this wouldn't have come together the way it did and i'm extremely grateful for that we have now a product we are very proud of that we are happy to share with you so this is part one of my discussion with raf gibson since we were at the printer working on his book i thought it would be really interesting to get him to talk about the influence and inspiration that he drew from photography books and what it means to make a book in general so without further ado this is ralph gibson okay ralph i want to circle back to a couple of years ago when i took your advancing photographer workshop and one thing you said to me uh during that time that seems very obvious but i think a lot of people overlooked is this whole idea of context and what you said to me specifically was the great henri cartier-bresson with the decisive moment if he had called that book henri's greatest hits it might not have had the same ring as a book form or if we look at the americans if it were called frank's best context is important and what role does context play to you when you're addressing a new project or a new book well to answer that question we'll take a few steps back into the history of the printed page we have to understand that almost everything i knew anybody knew in the 50s and 60s was learned from books if you if you knew of a photographer you knew about their work either from the printed pages of life magazine or the few books that were occasionally you could get your hands on there was no way for a photographer to establish himself or herself other than through a book because everything i knew about photography in those days as you mentioned was a decisive moment american photographs by walker irvine the americans by robert frank and a few others you know ansel edward weston my camera and point lobos so this indicates instantly that any photographic recognition was going to come from a published body of work you see so i wanted very much to uh not be a photojournalist i wanted to function as an independent autonomous photographer and i started working on my book the subname list and fortunately it took me three years to decide to publish it myself i was in and out of several other publishing deals or people wanted to edit the book and i wanted autonomy and so we come to a point where the photographers that we all admired had books that were not just books they were very good books you see i remember in 1970 a statistic which was probably accurate which stated that all forms of publish included 3 000 books a day were being published in america now those were all kinds of books as you can imagine now the other thing is that at this time if you went into the leisure section of a major bookstore what you would see was a macrame tie-dying hippie stuff batik leather leather butchery things like that wood butchery how to how to do stuff in the manner of the the leisure hobby class which is imitating hippie life around 1970 i came out with a some ambulance dwayne came out with things are queer there were a few other books lee came out with self-portrait and all of a sudden little by little photography books started muscling out the the hippie stuff until you had a whole set section in bookstores by 1973 74 of art photography books now any single one of these books many of which are in our collections today by prominent workers of the time they all dealt with specific themes you asked me to define the word context well for example if uh if i have a beautiful nude torso abdomen bosom of a beautiful uh woman i could say the breast of the venus de milo and we would look at that torso within a certain context if the title below it said still no cure for breast cancer that picture would look very different we would we would interpret it from a wholly entirely different point of view so uh that's why i say the somnambulist which already says sleepwalker and then in the brief two-paragraph prologue i state while sleeping a dreamer reappears elsewhere on the planet and this is a book about this guy who prefers to be the dreamer so now all of a sudden the photographs that you're looking at are not 48 photos by ralph they're about the same ambulance so it's a situation where the book functions in a very important way emphatically suggests how these photographs are to be viewed so that's my answer to your question of contacts when when the synapse came out and i've noted there are interviews with some of your colleagues from that era mary allen comes to mind in fact i think specifically there's an interview in which she said uh the buzz was this guy ralph gibson self-publishing that was unusual in those days to do and you mentioned before you go through a press you can get a book deal but there's an editor who comes in and makes decisions for you and all you were very driven to do that i mean that was not something that was common i mean what hopes did you have to jump through to get that done and maybe that's the three-year timeline on that somewhat well i have to say that by the time i was able to i did a job at the mgm annual report my friend bob overby got me this and i used that money to pay the lithographer pay the printer now i have to say by the time i got this an ambulance printed i really didn't care what anybody thought of it because i really knew what i thought about it there was no doubt in my mind that this work for what i was intending to do what i set out to achieve had in fact performed that so with this degree of i guess i have to say confidence at the expense of my self-modesty but with this with this degree of confidence you can publish and you're not really you're not really vulnerable to the praise or the condemnation of others now as it turns out three months later i had nothing but praise for the book and i was established but the one time i stood up and said i'm going to do it the way i want to do it turned out to be what made my career you see it's why i'm sitting in this chair today every book follows that yes and and so since that time uh uh i strongly i'd strongly admonish photographers to take this position because who knows better what the artist is trying to do than the artist himself or herself you're the ones who know really if you take the time the fact that it took me three years to publish is an ambulance you know i i should point out in the first week i had the first 24 pages and the books only 48 pages long so uh i really knew what those photographs were saying by the time i released them most photographers don't edit with that degree of of uh total fascism you know did it come naturally with the f i mean black trilogy being the first three uh did it come a little quicker once you realize that you had that control over your own work and you had that confidence uh i knew two things ted right off the bat that i wasn't going to do son of some nebulous but at the end of every project there's a few prints left over which are harbingers and indicate where i wanted to go next and i thought a deja vu happens about as quick as a shutter release and i had always wanted to use that as a way of searching for my next photograph well in the cover of days at sea is the plume which is probably your most well-known photograph would you say it's one of them yes i think mary jane sardinia has eclipsed it but uh fortunately i'm pleased to announce but the thing is that you know days at sea had to do with uh supposedly my erotic fantasies as a sailor and uh we know that that sex doesn't look the way it feels and i i was it's very hard to make a specifically erotic photograph that that that functions in in a emotional context so that picture happens to be one that's explicitly erotic but has certain formal formal properties that enable it to exist sure you know the black trilogy obviously the the reference to the the look that you had doing black and white film back then the imperfections of it the things that you're known for moving to color is a bold move i think artists tend to get pigeonholed into they're known for this i think everybody probably fights with that at some point was there a reaction maybe of something you didn't care about was their reaction to your move to doing color later no i have to say that i had tried some early extremely minimal color just close-ups of brick walls and this and that and i uh i showed them at castelli in my second show at castelli and ran into i received some flack for that particular exhibit and they were just close-ups of tiles and and they were very geometric and uh i did it the show was essentially uh essentially criticized art form liked it but a lot of photographers didn't but what i learned from that moved me into the black series the architectural which i wound up showing at pompey do so i mean uh it did okay it did okay so so you know you know uh we get into a situation where you need recognition in order to be able to make a living in order to be able to do your work on the other hand if you have recognition that means people are looking and saying what they think about your work and you really cannot listen to them it's very very dangerous first once you have an audience to listen to it and that's of course a contradiction in in motion but uh it's very contrapuntal that way uh i just i just feel that i have to remain true to my muse and and will therefore prevailwelcome back everyone i have something that i am really excited to share with you guys today this has been a long time in the making and many of you know that i have been working a lot with ralph gibson over the last few years i've talked about it a lot on this show i featured him on the show before about 2020 or so i had an opportunity to study with ralph as part of his advancing photographer workshop series i also did some bookmaking workshops he's somebody that i would consider not just a friend but a mentor he's somebody that i look up to with an immense amount of respect he is one of the greatest photographers of his generation an amazing career starting in the 1960s he was part of the new york scene he is still actively producing work today and he is an enormous inspiration and somebody that i look up to a great deal so ralph gibson has a new book that he has just completed called refractions 2. i've got an unbound preview copy i've read the whole thing it is just phenomenal this is really going to be exciting a couple months ago i had an opportunity to go up to exton pennsylvania which is right outside of philadelphia to go to the printer which is brilliant graphics whose ralph's is working with on this project and do some interviews and some behind the scenes footage and i'm really excited because i'm going to share the first part of that with you guys in this video and i want to extend a very warm thank you to leica for help making this project happen without their generosity and support this wouldn't have come together the way it did and i'm extremely grateful for that we have now a product we are very proud of that we are happy to share with you so this is part one of my discussion with raf gibson since we were at the printer working on his book i thought it would be really interesting to get him to talk about the influence and inspiration that he drew from photography books and what it means to make a book in general so without further ado this is ralph gibson okay ralph i want to circle back to a couple of years ago when i took your advancing photographer workshop and one thing you said to me uh during that time that seems very obvious but i think a lot of people overlooked is this whole idea of context and what you said to me specifically was the great henri cartier-bresson with the decisive moment if he had called that book henri's greatest hits it might not have had the same ring as a book form or if we look at the americans if it were called frank's best context is important and what role does context play to you when you're addressing a new project or a new book well to answer that question we'll take a few steps back into the history of the printed page we have to understand that almost everything i knew anybody knew in the 50s and 60s was learned from books if you if you knew of a photographer you knew about their work either from the printed pages of life magazine or the few books that were occasionally you could get your hands on there was no way for a photographer to establish himself or herself other than through a book because everything i knew about photography in those days as you mentioned was a decisive moment american photographs by walker irvine the americans by robert frank and a few others you know ansel edward weston my camera and point lobos so this indicates instantly that any photographic recognition was going to come from a published body of work you see so i wanted very much to uh not be a photojournalist i wanted to function as an independent autonomous photographer and i started working on my book the subname list and fortunately it took me three years to decide to publish it myself i was in and out of several other publishing deals or people wanted to edit the book and i wanted autonomy and so we come to a point where the photographers that we all admired had books that were not just books they were very good books you see i remember in 1970 a statistic which was probably accurate which stated that all forms of publish included 3 000 books a day were being published in america now those were all kinds of books as you can imagine now the other thing is that at this time if you went into the leisure section of a major bookstore what you would see was a macrame tie-dying hippie stuff batik leather leather butchery things like that wood butchery how to how to do stuff in the manner of the the leisure hobby class which is imitating hippie life around 1970 i came out with a some ambulance dwayne came out with things are queer there were a few other books lee came out with self-portrait and all of a sudden little by little photography books started muscling out the the hippie stuff until you had a whole set section in bookstores by 1973 74 of art photography books now any single one of these books many of which are in our collections today by prominent workers of the time they all dealt with specific themes you asked me to define the word context well for example if uh if i have a beautiful nude torso abdomen bosom of a beautiful uh woman i could say the breast of the venus de milo and we would look at that torso within a certain context if the title below it said still no cure for breast cancer that picture would look very different we would we would interpret it from a wholly entirely different point of view so uh that's why i say the somnambulist which already says sleepwalker and then in the brief two-paragraph prologue i state while sleeping a dreamer reappears elsewhere on the planet and this is a book about this guy who prefers to be the dreamer so now all of a sudden the photographs that you're looking at are not 48 photos by ralph they're about the same ambulance so it's a situation where the book functions in a very important way emphatically suggests how these photographs are to be viewed so that's my answer to your question of contacts when when the synapse came out and i've noted there are interviews with some of your colleagues from that era mary allen comes to mind in fact i think specifically there's an interview in which she said uh the buzz was this guy ralph gibson self-publishing that was unusual in those days to do and you mentioned before you go through a press you can get a book deal but there's an editor who comes in and makes decisions for you and all you were very driven to do that i mean that was not something that was common i mean what hopes did you have to jump through to get that done and maybe that's the three-year timeline on that somewhat well i have to say that by the time i was able to i did a job at the mgm annual report my friend bob overby got me this and i used that money to pay the lithographer pay the printer now i have to say by the time i got this an ambulance printed i really didn't care what anybody thought of it because i really knew what i thought about it there was no doubt in my mind that this work for what i was intending to do what i set out to achieve had in fact performed that so with this degree of i guess i have to say confidence at the expense of my self-modesty but with this with this degree of confidence you can publish and you're not really you're not really vulnerable to the praise or the condemnation of others now as it turns out three months later i had nothing but praise for the book and i was established but the one time i stood up and said i'm going to do it the way i want to do it turned out to be what made my career you see it's why i'm sitting in this chair today every book follows that yes and and so since that time uh uh i strongly i'd strongly admonish photographers to take this position because who knows better what the artist is trying to do than the artist himself or herself you're the ones who know really if you take the time the fact that it took me three years to publish is an ambulance you know i i should point out in the first week i had the first 24 pages and the books only 48 pages long so uh i really knew what those photographs were saying by the time i released them most photographers don't edit with that degree of of uh total fascism you know did it come naturally with the f i mean black trilogy being the first three uh did it come a little quicker once you realize that you had that control over your own work and you had that confidence uh i knew two things ted right off the bat that i wasn't going to do son of some nebulous but at the end of every project there's a few prints left over which are harbingers and indicate where i wanted to go next and i thought a deja vu happens about as quick as a shutter release and i had always wanted to use that as a way of searching for my next photograph well in the cover of days at sea is the plume which is probably your most well-known photograph would you say it's one of them yes i think mary jane sardinia has eclipsed it but uh fortunately i'm pleased to announce but the thing is that you know days at sea had to do with uh supposedly my erotic fantasies as a sailor and uh we know that that sex doesn't look the way it feels and i i was it's very hard to make a specifically erotic photograph that that that functions in in a emotional context so that picture happens to be one that's explicitly erotic but has certain formal formal properties that enable it to exist sure you know the black trilogy obviously the the reference to the the look that you had doing black and white film back then the imperfections of it the things that you're known for moving to color is a bold move i think artists tend to get pigeonholed into they're known for this i think everybody probably fights with that at some point was there a reaction maybe of something you didn't care about was their reaction to your move to doing color later no i have to say that i had tried some early extremely minimal color just close-ups of brick walls and this and that and i uh i showed them at castelli in my second show at castelli and ran into i received some flack for that particular exhibit and they were just close-ups of tiles and and they were very geometric and uh i did it the show was essentially uh essentially criticized art form liked it but a lot of photographers didn't but what i learned from that moved me into the black series the architectural which i wound up showing at pompey do so i mean uh it did okay it did okay so so you know you know uh we get into a situation where you need recognition in order to be able to make a living in order to be able to do your work on the other hand if you have recognition that means people are looking and saying what they think about your work and you really cannot listen to them it's very very dangerous first once you have an audience to listen to it and that's of course a contradiction in in motion but uh it's very contrapuntal that way uh i just i just feel that i have to remain true to my muse and and will therefore prevail\n"