La Trilogie
2017
£140.00
First edition of La Trilogy by Ralph Gibson. First impression. Medium format softback in fine condition. Some minor shelf wear to the outer edges only. Signed by the artist on the title page. Text in French.
About
In 1973 Ralph Gibson published his first photobook, The Somnambulist; he followed up with Déjà Vu in 1973, and Days at Sea in 1974. Together the books form a trilogy which has been credited with re-imagining the modern photobook.
Born in 1939 in LA, at the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Gibson was inspired by the cinema – both the American movies he grew up with, and the avant-garde films made by later European auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. Trained in photography while in the American Navy, from 1956-1959, Gibson went on to work for Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, and moved to New York in 1966.
Gilles Mora, curator of the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, which held the Trilogy exhibition at the end of 2017, describes Gibson as one of “the last heroes of photography”, and credits him with having a lasting influence on photographers to this day. A number of Gibson’s images have also become known beyond the photography world, however – particularly Hand Through a Doorway, from The Somnambulist, which was used on the inner sleeve of Joy Division’s 1979 album Unknown Pleasures.
