Ralph Gibson

My main inspiration for my images is Ralph Gibson and his book “Refractions- thoughts on aesthetics and beauty”. Gibson was an assistant to Dorothea Lange, which is how I came across him when researching Lange herself. Gibson has some very interesting ideas about aesthetics, and has given me ideas on what to photograph and how to photograph.

Ralph Gibson

In his book, Gibson explains that Lange told him for an image to work, “a photographer must be directed, have a point of departure”. Because of his book, I decided to take images of aesthetic architecture.

One type of aesthetic imagery I would really like to explore is imagery of nothing. Gibson explains he was inspired by Ad Reinhardt, and took a picture of the sky that was “nothing more than a grey rectangle, yet it functioned totally as a photograph”. I have tried to take images of nothing, and make them aesthetically pleasing.

One successful example of this is the famous painting by Robert Rauschenberg, “White Painting (three panel)”

This is just a blank canvas painted white, yet it is regarded as an aesthetically pleasing image.

Another example is the fictitious “Rabbit in a Snowstorm” painting in Marvel’s “Daredevil”

My image of nothing is self titled as Static.

I managed to create this image by taking a photograph of a blank screen, hence the clearly shown individual pixels. I believe images such as these are very interesting, as they question the definition of beauty.