Infanta

The subject of the nude has been a source of inspiration for artists since the earliest known representations. Ralph Gibson makes no secret of the passions that drive him: his love for photography and women; parallel affairs of the heart which meet in homage to the beauty of the female form. Infanta is a protracted study from one of the fine art photography's most acclaimed and influential practitioners.

The female nude has long been an important subject for photographer Gibson, but in earlier books, his nudes appeared as elements in sequences of all kinds of images. With Infanta, Gibson abandons the sequencing, presenting instead a collection of big, rather simplified black-and-white images. Like Lee Friedlander in his Nudes (1991), in middle age Gibson expresses an intense fascination with the bodies of young women. Whereas Friedlander used the camera to awkwardly describe specific details, Gibson uses his to idealize beautiful body fragments. Gibson's high-contrast, grainy printing style and abstract compositions have hardly changed in two decades. Alexandra Anderson-Spivy's accompanying essay perceptively responds to Gibson's work, but Mary Gaitskill's vulgar afterword (the memoir of a stripper) seems jarringly inappropriate to the idealism of the photographs. Gretchen Garner