Oral History interview with Ralph Gibson, 2022 July 26-August 3

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Ralph Gibson on July 26 and August 23, 2022. The interview took place at Gibson's studio in East Hampton, New York, and was conducted by Terrie Sultan for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Ralph Gibson and Terrie Sultan have reviewed the transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

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TERRIE SULTAN:  Now is the time for all good men.

RALPH GIBSON:  Okay.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Good morning.

RALPH GIBSON:  Good morning—

TERRIE SULTAN:  This is—

RALPH GIBSON:  —Terrie.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —Terrie Sultan interviewing Ralph Gibson at his studio [in –Ed.] East Hampton, on—

RALPH GIBSON:  Twenty-seven.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —Tuesday, July 26, 2022. Good morning, Ralph.

RALPH GIBSON:  Good morning, Terrie, very happy to see you.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, I'm happy to see you too, and I'm happy to hear the story that you've mostly moved out here permanently, and you're going to be a part of—

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh, I don't—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —our community for forever.

RALPH GIBSON:  It's really true. I—the honeymoon was over in New York. I used to say to people I don't smoke, I don't drink, I live in New York, and now, I don't even do that, and closed up my studio there, opened these spaces. I can come here every day from our condo, and it's just the best life I could imagine.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So let's start at the very beginning of this best life that you can imagine. You were born in Los Angeles in 193—

RALPH GIBSON:  —['3]9.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —9. What was it like in Los Angeles? What was your family like?

RALPH GIBSON:  It's a great story, Los Angeles in the '30s and '40s. I guess my first conscious recollection was staring at this Gothic-shaped wooden radio in the kitchen at breakfast one morning, and my parents were shocked, looking at the radio. And we—I believe it was when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, but it might not have been that, because I would've only been two and a half, or three, but that's—I do recall this vividly. And we grew up, and it was extremely bucolic, suburban desert, hot, San Fernando Valley. My father worked at Warner Brothers. He was an assistant director in the movies, and he basically spent a big chunk of his career as assistant to Alfred Hitchcock. And I used to go on the set a lot as a kid, and I knew a lot of movie stars, and it was very glamorous, and it stayed that way. I even worked extra and did bit parts until I was about 13, and then the family collapsed due to alcoholism. And I was out of the house at 16 and into the Navy at 17 where, five-thirty in the morning, they made me a photographer.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Because your father had been in the movie business?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, actually, they give you a standard series of aptitude tests when you enlist, and I—the very highest thing you can aspire towards is to be in the control tower, an aerographer, and I qualified for that on the strength of this test. But when the guy told me, "Congratulations, you—" I was indifferent. I said, "Okay, I don't care." He said, "You don't care?" He said, "There's somebody here who really wants that job," or that billet, it was called. "Suppose we send you to photo school?" I said, "Okay." And so, I had failed high school—

TERRIE SULTAN:  I was going to ask you, did you finish high school?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, I never have. I have a driver's license, okay—

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  —but I don't have a high school diploma. And I had failed high school and then I felt, like any child would feel, adolescent, I'd failed my family. So now they sent me to photography school in the Navy, and I promptly fail out of photography school, and so I realized that by the time I was 17, I had reached a nadir, and so I wrote the captain a letter asking to be readmitted into photography school in Pensacola, and he said, "Okay, but there—it will be a few months before another class starts up." And so he sent me to clean the barracks' latrines for several months, a barracks of 600 guys, so it wasn't a pleasant job, my humble origins as a photographer.

But then I went through the school with flying colors, but it really began when we were crossing the North Atlantic. My first ship was a hydrographic survey ship. We were destined for Turkey—bound for Turkey to draw maps of the bottom of the Aegean Sea, depth soundings of the Aegean Sea, which were out of date. This is 1956, '57. So I'm standing watch at three-thirty in the morning on—it's called dogging the watch, it was for the newest guy on the ship, and it was an extremely unpleasant—it was a storm. I was lashed to the rail with a safety thing, and had to haul up this torpedo-like shape that was taking temperature readings of the bottom of the ocean. That's another thing we did, 3000 feet down, and we had a big winch. And it was snow—it was sleet and rain and thunder and lightning, and I was just drenched and miserable. And I looked up at the heavens, and I shouted in my little squeaky voice, "I'm going to be a photographer!" Well, apparently I'm still shouting now, 65 years later, and—but it was my epiphany.

[00:05:12]

On the other side of that storm cloud was my lucky star, and I've never doubted, I've never looked back, through thick or thin, that my destiny and my vocation was photography.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Wow.

RALPH GIBSON:  It's like being—it's like inheriting a very large sum of money on your 18th birthday or something like that. I—my identity was formed. I was no longer, as they say, adrift, pardon the pun. I—so I quickly put an air mattress in the darkroom as a photographer's mate, slept on the deck of the darkroom, and all I did for the next two and half years was study photography and classical guitar, but mostly photography.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Did you have—was there another officer or anyone on the ship that was like a photographer mentor for you, or was it just you?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, this is a really interesting story. There was a chief petty officer, which would be like a master sergeant, and this was in 1956, '57, and you have to remember that World War Two was over in '45. Now Edward Steichen, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art Photography Department had also in World War Two founded naval photography. So as it turns out, my chief, who was just a guy from Georgia, you know, Alabama, or something, had actually studied with Minor White. Because Steichen hired all these heavy photographers to explain the mysteries of the darkroom, which, in those days, the chemicals were very difficult to control, no real exposure meters, the films were slow, you had to learn a lot. It was more of like a pharm—to be a pharmacisian [ph]—pharmacist, to be able to develop film and mix developers.

So actually, naval photography was an extremely sophisticated school considering the time. There was probably no better place to learn the intricacies of photography. And then because it was a military thing, I had to do aerial portraiture, industrial still life, photolithography. We—the photography lab and the litho press on the ship were joined, so I made halftone negatives for the lithographer, which, as you know, my career as a bookmaker, I talked to printers, and they just—how could I know as much as I do about running those presses? So it was an optimum moment in this man's life, and all I did was I just stayed focused on the subject, and I rose through the ranks. By the time I was 20, I was an E-5, which is like a tech sergeant, I had 10 guys under me, and they really didn't want me to leave the Navy. I have a letter from the captain, they—but I was destined for other things, but I did learn.

And so when I came out of the Navy at age—just before I turned 21, I went to the San Francisco Art Institute.

TERRIE SULTAN:  How could you get into the San Francisco Art Institute without having a high school diploma?

RALPH GIBSON:  I think they gave me a GED test to take at the door, or something like that.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And was this on the—

RALPH GIBSON:  No—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —GI Bill?

RALPH GIBSON:  —didn't get it. I didn't have the GI Bill, I was somehow in between. It was before Vietnam and after Korea or something; it was not available. And so to be perfectly honest with you, I only lasted in school for a semester, because I didn't have a penny. I was living in a hotel for four dollars a week. They give you one sheet every Thursday, and you take your top sheet and make it the bottom, put the clean one on top. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  I've heard that story, but I never thought it was real.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, it was for real, and so. But then about that time, Dorothea Lange was looking for an assistant, and because of my technical abilities, I was well in advance of the faculty at the school, you know, they asked me. I'd get looks on developing my film, they'd say, "How do you do that?" The instructor would ask me to tell them my darkroom tricks, you know. So I got the job. Dorothea asked the head of the photography department for—who would he recommend, and he just—you know, there was nobody who could compete with me. These were all kids starting out and going to art school, you know, they didn't know.

TERRIE SULTAN:  But you were still a kid too, basically, 21 is not very old.

RALPH GIBSON:  No, but I had all this under my belt, and so I got the job working for Dorothea about the time I had dropped out of school. And that was of course a great education, because in about the first hour in her darkroom, I realized how much she didn't know about technique.

[00:10:05]

And all of a sudden, the deconstruction, the demystification of the formal aspects over the contentual were becoming blatantly apparent to me for the first time. You see, photography in that period in the early '60s was all about the mystification in the darkroom. There—it was an alchemy, it was like—so—

I lasted with her for a year and a half and then then quit shooting, but she's the one who gave my point of departure theory, which I've written about. And, you know, I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist, and I did that early work in Los Angeles on the Sunset Strip and things like that. And I was working occasionally for graphic designers, but I was really, really starving, had a hundred-dollar car, pawning cameras all the time, and, you know, moving around for furnished rooms, but I managed to go to New York. Bruce Davidson had been in LA and was called back, and so he said, "If you drive my camper back to New York, I'll give you 200 bucks, a credit card, and a week at the Chelsea Hotel."

TERRIE SULTAN:  Who's Bruce Davidson?

RALPH GIBSON:  Bruce Davidson was a prominent photojournalist at the time, Magnum photographer. So I drove back to New York, checked into the Chelsea, and I was like somebody who came out of the closet, I was finally in my element. I was finally where I knew I could fulfill my potential. I was presented to this cooperative called Magnum, which is very important, and at 27, I was in Magnum, so that—

TERRIE SULTAN:  What is it—how do you get into Magnum, what do you have to do?

RALPH GIBSON:  There—they invite you on the basis of what you've done and then you—there's a probationary period. And in those days, photojournalism, the magazines were still going strong, Life, Look, Time. These magazines had massive multimillion circulations and—but I very quickly—see, that was—by that time, I had been working for 10 years, I was 27, so 17 to 27. And I realized that somehow or other, I didn't like it, but I couldn't understand why I had been working so hard towards that goal and didn't care for it. And about that time I met Robert Frank, and I started assisting him on his films. Now, The Americans had galvanized my generation of photographers, we were all, and for me to go from Dorothea to Robert, you know, another great photographer, see his creative process. And he had been educated in Switzerland, and he was even more technically advanced than I was, because he—that Swiss glacier thing, you know. But his work is famous for its lack of formal brilliance in terms of technical brilliance.

A brief aside is that he lived on 10th Street, and he had watched de Kooning across the courtyard, or [Franz] Kline, it was Kline at that time, making these gestures. So Robert put on a wide lens on his camera and started making these gestures and accessed visual territory that would—previously been unavailable. But, you know, his picture is out of focus, blurred, and all that shit, you know. That enlarger right up there, he gave it to me, he printed The Americans on it; I printed all my books on it, Larry Clark printed Tulsa on it. It should probably go to the Smithsonian, all right. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  I just want to keep this.

RALPH GIBSON:  So now, I'm watching Robert work.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So let's pause for a second about watching Robert and Dorothea Lange. When you talk about the creative process, what was different in the way those two artists that were seminal for you, what was it that you learned from each of them about their creative process that informed what you do?

RALPH GIBSON:  Great. Well, one day, Dorothea and I—and she would call me the night before, or I would call her the night before, and she would send me to Brooks Cameras to buy many different kinds of photo paper. In those days, on the market, there was maybe 15 brands, and she was always trying a new brand; Newmark, DuPont, Kodak, Agfa, Ilford, they were around. And so we'd spend all day printing a picture of what I thought was a girl with dark circles under her eyes standing in front of the clapboard wall. I thought it was a woman, I thought it was a young woman, so I said, "Dorothea, tell me the story of this young woman." She said, "Oh, Ralph—Rafael, that's not a young woman, that's a little girl, and she was retarded, and all the other kids tortured her and made fun of her." And while Dorothea was telling me the story, she started to cry, and this was 1960, and the picture was made in the '30s, and it was still—

[00:15:00]

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RALPH GIBSON:  —resonating with sufficient force that brought tears to the maker's eyes. And I knew that I wanted to create work that would have staying power, that would—that would be able to hold the wall, to remain emotionally charged. Whereas photography in those days was ephemera. You look at the picture in the page, turn the page, look at the picture, turn the page, turn the page. It was designed to be ephemeral, the magazines, the layouts would encourage fast page-turning, and—

So I learned that from Dorothea, the idea that a photograph could harbor a protracted, enduring content. Now, easier said than done. I showed her my work—about that time I'd been working for a year—and she said, "You could show me your pictures," and she said, "I see your problem, you have no point of departure, Rafael." I said, "That's true, Dorothea. What is a point of departure?" And she said, "If you're going down to the drugstore to buy toothpaste, because you're motivated and directed you might encounter an event worth photographing, but if you just drift around Market Street all day, you're not going to get anything." And photographers just claim they love to be on a dérive, just drifting around; feeling it, man, just go—you know? They wind up with boxes full pictures that don't add up to anything.

So since I started working on my first book, after I dropped out of Magnum, I started doing The Somnambulist, and then all of a sudden, every picture I'm taking, I'm looking at that tape recorder, or that paper cup, is this part of my dream reality? I had a—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Why did you drop out of Magnum, are you—because you stopped being a photojournalist?

RALPH GIBSON:  I didn't want—I stopped wanting to have the subject of the photograph be the content of the photograph. I didn't know it at the time, but I had always wanted my perceptual act to be the subject of the photograph.

TERRIE SULTAN:  That's a big thing, that's important that—there—that's a real difference.

RALPH GIBSON:  It's huge. It's—the event is not based on the guy about to get his brains blown out. The event is based on my raising my perception to a sufficient point to where I could do something with this paper cup, and the light shining through the back of the cup down, edge of the table. I'm—I don't want the content to be supported by—and now, many years later, I'm engaged in attempting to separate the object from its name.

TERRIE SULTAN:  What do you mean by that?

RALPH GIBSON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. English spoken here. What do you call that?

TERRIE SULTAN:  It's a cup.

RALPH GIBSON:  All right, well, suppose I photograph it in such a way that it isn't? But at the same time, it retains all its relationship to—by virtue of its shape, to its formal and previous intention, but now is resonating in another way.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So is this what you took away from Dorothea—

RALPH GIBSON:  It was a start.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —the—you know, it's like, how do you have a point of view that—

RALPH GIBSON:  Point of—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —makes you—

RALPH GIBSON:  —departure.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —a point of departure that makes your work yours.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes, and I don't know who's going to read this or hear this, but the truth of the matter is it was the origins of what we'll call my particular visual signature, and any photographer that you admire, his or her work is distinctly recognizable as belonging to them for certain specific reasons. Now, in my case, it has to do with that. I—I've been doing these online seminars during the pandemic, and I said to this one woman in her mansion in Connecticut, I said, "Why are you taking my course?" She said, "I want to know why when I look at a picture of a brick wall, I can tell it's by Ralph Gibson." [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  You know what, I think that's actually a very good point—

RALPH GIBSON:  A beautiful answer.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —of inquiry, yes. It's—

RALPH GIBSON:  It's—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —like, how is it that—?

RALPH GIBSON:  —yeah, I—it's music.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yes.

RALPH GIBSON:  Because it really means that it's getting through, and—but you see, when you photograph with my particular set of components, my points of departure, my reasons, my aesthetics, the correspondent, that is to say the viewer, is not really included in the process. And when you work as a photojournalist, it's all for the viewer. The viewer is the process. Certain magazines have editorial policies, they go for this or that. Certain schools of photography send out alumni who pursue the modernist technique, or the postmodern, Photoshop pursuits, you see. I mean, there's a lot of different ways, and photography has consistently eluded any single definition. For the longest time, the Museum of Modern Art ran the show, but they don't anymore. The medium has just gone in too many different directions.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Does anybody run the show now?

RALPH GIBSON:  No. What we have now is in the semiotic, the linguistic of visual communication; we have an entirely new language being forged. And when I moved to digital in 70—at age 75, it was the perfect moment, in terms of my personal interest, because I spoke the language of light on film, and now I'm speaking the language of light on a sensor, and it's a slightly different but very important difference.

[00:05:25]

TERRIE SULTAN:  What did you learn from Robert Frank that stayed with you throughout your career?

RALPH GIBSON:  We were working on Me and My Brother, and I was doing all the lighting for these complicated scenes, and one night, he's driving me home, and he says, "I might fall flat on my face, but at least I'm doing something original." And in fact, on that film, he did fall flat on his face; it's never really been well understood or grasped. You may have seen it, you know, but he—you see, I came to realize that, as a European, I've been very active throughout my whole career in Europe. You know, these great cultures, these great countries have their own cultural formations, which they vividly adhere to in order to keep the culture alive. France and Italy are the two most prominent ones, France especially. And when Robert came to America, where we have no academy; in America, you are obliged to be original. Originality is what is—if we have an academy, it's predicated on our innovation, Yankee ingenuity, things like that. And that suited me to a T, and he came in pursuit of it, and look what he achieved, you know?

I mean, it—it's really—it's an amazing thing, because photography in the '50s, World War Two interrupted the flow of development of photographic aesthetics in Europe. Prior to World War Two, it was Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Kertész, these great early masters. But then from 1940 to around 1960 while Europe was rebuilding, my generation, called the middle generation, comes on the scene, and we changed things drastically. Duane Michals is doing his Sequences, you know, Larry deconstructing documentary photography and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Larry Clark?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, and, you know, a number of us got a lot of attention during that period. Lee Friedlander, you know, went off on his own thing. And so Robert came, in lieu of the middle generation as—in 1950, he—

TERRIE SULTAN:  How much older than you is—was Robert?

RALPH GIBSON:  About—I've calculated not too long ago, something like 15, 14, 16 years, something like that.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So just enough of a gap to make him a colleague-slash-teacher?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. We—he was in Mexico when—with his family, and he invited me down there, and they left, and he and I drove around Mexico and drove back to New York. And we were very close, and towards the end of his life, though, we got close again. I'll dig through the picture; I'll show you. I used to go sit with him over in the Bowery, you know, on Bleecker Street, and make him laugh.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Was that important, to be able to make him laugh?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you know, Robert had lived—he was beyond old by the time he died. He was—there's something, there's something on the other side of age, which is—I observed in him. But he did—what—the only disappointment and the only failure in Robert's life is that he died so rich. That's—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you think that money had a big impact on him?

RALPH GIBSON:  He hated everything and anything bourgeois. Everything and anything that—that's—that spoke of the middle class, or upper-middle class, was an anathema to him. And the fact that he did so well all the while trying to—but other than that—but it's a very interesting thing how different people have different requirements. Any master you've ever spoken with, he or she has a whole other horn to blow, you know. I mean, we're all doing it for different reasons, so, I mean, yeah.

But then I became friends with Kertész, I'm very close to Kertész. He said, "You come anytime, don't call, just come," and I had a studio on Broadway, and he lived on One Fifth Avenue, and I was in my forties, and when Kertész says come, I was there three times a week.

TERRIE SULTAN:  How did you meet him?

RALPH GIBSON:  Maybe at LIGHT Gallery or something, when—in my publishing days, he was in one of my books, you know, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So when you say your publishing days, talk a little bit about the—all the books that you've done. They're not all about your work, you did other—

[00:10:08]

RALPH GIBSON:  No.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —kinds of publishing as well.

RALPH GIBSON:  There was a period where—yes, there was a period where I had done The Somnambulist, and it got lots of attention, and so then I did Tulsa with Larry because he was crashing in my loft at the time, and so we did that. And I did Mary Ellen's book, and then I did Robert's Lines of My Hand, and I was ready to quit.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mary Ellen—?

RALPH GIBSON:  Mark.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —Mark.

RALPH GIBSON:  I was ready to quit because it was all business, fighting with these ganef paper salesman over how much per pound you're going to pay for the paper, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Was one of those salesman Louis Meisel by any chance?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, no, he wasn't—

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  —but I knew, I knew of him, so. I wanted to quit, and then I knew a graphic designer friend, Arne Lewis, and he knew this lawyer guy, John Flattau, and they said, "Lewis, we've got some money," and the lawyer says, "Let's keep doing books because you're getting a lot of attention." And you see, on the strength of all the attention I got from these books, you know, the New York Times would cover every one, do profiles on me, and so. So I could get on any photographer I wanted in one of my projects; they knew they were going to come out. And people—photographers were very suspect of publication in those days. In—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Why was that, do you think?

RALPH GIBSON:  In those days, when you'd have a picture in the New York Times or in Life or something and you'd show the spread, the first thing somebody would say, "Wow, now, that looks pretty good, you didn't lose much in reproduction." You see—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So that's always a fear, huh?

RALPH GIBSON:  That was always the fear, and I knew from my Navy days of a—I knew in my Navy days—here's a picture of me and Helmut.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Helmut Newton—

RALPH GIBSON:  —Newton. [Laughs.] South of France. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, you guys look happy.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah. Yeah, so we—so I published, and we were very successful.

TERRIE SULTAN:  What years was this when you started the publishing?

RALPH GIBSON:  Lustrum, Lustrum was doing very well from '75 to '85 when I quit, '80—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Lustrum was the—?

RALPH GIBSON:  Lustrum Press, my press. And so I had made this partnership, and I said anytime I want to quit, the name reverts to me, and we had a lot of money in the bank. But I got into publishing just by chance because I wanted to be able to earn enough money to do my work, and I needed just enough recognition to be able to do my projects without having to work commercially or teaching, I didn't want to do either, and that's what I got basically. But in those days, there were a lot of National Endowment grants around, and CAPS, and things like that. So we—but what really was happening was this. In your bookstores in the late '60s and early '70s, if you go to the leisure section, it was all hippie stuff; wood butchering, tie-dyeing, leathercraft, macramé, stuff like that. And then I come along with my book, and the Japanese cameras are getting better, Leicas are getting better, and all of a sudden the photography art book thing starts going. I just stumbled into it. I was one of three or four people who came out with a book and caught a wave, created a wave, caught a wave, whatever you want to call it.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Who did you think of as your competition in the publishing world at that time?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you know, there was Aperture, but, you see, they couldn't publish as many people as were around, you see, so. But they had set—Minor White, again, had set the bar very high at Aperture, and I met Michael Hoffman who was interested in The Somnambulist, but he wanted to edit it himself, and I wanted autonomy. I didn't want—he said, "I can come down on Wednesday nights and work on the sequence," you know. I wasn't about to let anybody, we—I worked on that sequence for three years, and it paid off, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Where did you get the money to start your own publishing company?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I never did. I had this friend, a graphic designer I—from—in Los Angeles from the early days before I moved to New York, Bob Overby, who became a painter, and he gave me a job. He was doing the MGM annual report, and he gave me this job to take all their slides from all their films that year and composite them and make collages, and it paid $8000, and I took that money, and I gave it to the printer. Now, the best part of that story is that it was Halloween when I got the check, October thirty-first, and I went into the bank in Culver City across from MGM where the check was drawn on, and I said, "I want to cash this," and I had my passport and my driver's license, which in those days, that's what you present to a bank. They said, "We can't do it." I said, "Let me talk to the manager." Now the—

[00:15:00]

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RALPH GIBSON:  —the cash was this. I was the last customer in the bank, and they were getting ready to close for a Halloween party, so they were all dressed up like Bozo and Rumpelstiltskin and Little Red Riding Hoods. So out comes the president of the bank with a red ball on his nose, and I forced him, so he gave me 8000 cash, and I went and paid the printer. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  That's a great story.

RALPH GIBSON:  It's so Hollywood, right?

TERRIE SULTAN:  It is.

RALPH GIBSON:  So—then my partners arrived, but I was going hand-to-mouth till I was 40, you know? I didn't—I had a much bigger reputation than a bank account in those days, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So as a former military person, you didn't have any kind of income, pension, anything—

RALPH GIBSON:  Nothing, no, no.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —from your service there?

RALPH GIBSON:  No. And it's very interesting, my New York partner, John Flattau, I learned business from—both my partners were Jewish, and they taught me New York Jewish business, and it's gotten me to this point. I'm still—I consider it a very, very high form of education that I received in terms of how to manage my own little career, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  You were not raised Jewish?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, I was raised Catholic, but then my grandfather married a woman who was married to a very, very highly successful Jewish director from the '20s, Al Green. So after mass on Sundays, we would go to Uncle Al's place, and then we'd be Jewish that afternoon. So I was getting the best of both, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you fit right in with the Jewish businessmen in New York when you moved?

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh yeah, I mean, I just knew that this was the elite, that's how—I've always admired that to this day. I'm going to go in France, to the Dreyfus Museum in Médan, to—I'm working on a big book of my French stuff, and I think—I did my Israel book, and I just—yes, I'm fascinated by all this. But, you see, photography was in a different place there. It was breaking loose in the '70s and '80s. You know it from your background as a museum director and curator, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Talk to me about your association and your love for France. When did that start, and what was it about that that appealed to you? Is it a place that you had visited when you were a young kid in the service, or what happened there?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, that's a good question, because we did stop at Monaco and Villefranche one time in—when I was in the Navy. But then what really got the thing going was in the '60s, Godard, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman were with that. That—those are probably the biggest influences on my work.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Movies?

RALPH GIBSON:  What I learned from those people.

TERRIE SULTAN:  From those people?

RALPH GIBSON:  The nature of—the psychological depth of an image from those directors. I was enormously under the influence of Ingmar Bergman, enormously, probably the two—probably the biggest influence in my entire career was Ingmar Bergman, certainly during that—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Did you ever meet him?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, I never did, I met—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So it was just watching—

RALPH GIBSON:  I met Bibi—

[Cross talk.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  —the films?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah. I know them all by heart, you know.

TERRIE SULTAN:  But it's funny that you say that films were so influential, but you never wanted to make films yourself?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, because I had been on a set as a kid as an actor, and I saw—I knew that business from the Hollywood point of view, and I saw how impenetrable it was. And I know that my contrast comes from being on the set, and seeing these carbon lights and inserts and closeups, and stuff, but that didn't come out in my work until maybe 10 years after I started. But, you know, when you really start tracing your influences, which I have in this new book, it's all about that, it's a very interesting thing. I was influenced by people like Morandi and de Chirico, and I list them all in there, you know, an—

But back to France, so Godard had done Breathless, and I'm looking at all these movies, and, you know, I grew up in LA, which was a one-horse town with, you know, everything made out of plywood, one story, it was not a very sophisticated place. Orange groves, long drives over crummy roads, and it took a long time for me to—so I wanted the culture of Europe. I vividly wanted the culture of Europe, not the culture of Hollywood, not the culture of Los Angeles. And you have to realize, in 1960, there wasn't a single museum director who hadn't got his or her thing at the Sorbonne, and, I mean, you know, that was where you became a 19th-century gentleperson.

[00:05:06]

Well, I—so, to jumps—jump ahead very quickly, I had a show, The Somnambulist at the American Cultural Center in Paris in '71, '72, and the entire art world and entelechy of Paris came to that show. In one night, I met everybody.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And—what—when was this, what year was that?

RALPH GIBSON:  '72. I was—and I remember getting off the train and going to the Café de la Paix and seeing one of those Morris columns, you know, where they have the posters of, you know, in the 19th century, and I said I would love to be recognized in this town. There was a poster for Nureyev, and I said, "I'd love to be recognized in this town." And so I started working there and going—by 1971, '72, I would get—I'd get a National Endowment for four or five thousand bucks. You could do a whole project on four thousand. I went to the Eastman House and said, "If you give me two thousand bucks, I've got about 10 pictures from Deja-Vu, I'm going to work on it, and I'll give you the whole series if you give me two grand in front." Van Deren Coke, he says, "Well, I did that with another photographer, and he burned me, but I could tell you're going to give me," so I did, and, you know, so they got Deja-Vu, and I had my show at the Eastman House. I mean, you could go to a museum and make a thing like that.

And so I went—I have been going to Europe four or five times a year since the '70s, and it was by design. It was like a self-fulfilling plan. I—I've had—in my autobiography Self-Exposure, I list several things that I've done by—the decisions I've made that had massive impact on how things worked out for me, you know.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And going to Europe was clearly—

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —one of them.

RALPH GIBSON:  I didn't put that in that list, but I realize it would've fit in. One was in 1961, I said, I'm only going to use a Leica, I'm not going to be one of those photo weenies that has every piece of equipment, because I wanted something to run consistently through my work, that—

TERRIE SULTAN:  And the make of camera makes that big a difference?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, committing to 35 and the Leica and the lenses, yes, those are strong, as opposed to different formats, you can—a lot of people do use lots of different cameras. And then I said, I'm going to do yoga every morning, which I have done since my twenties. And then I quit working commercially in my early—in my late twenties, I said I'm not going to do, and that was a great decision. And then I said I'm going to—I quit drinking in my fifties, and then I—my whole life boils down to six or seven major decisions. It's very clear at this point, you know, and it worked out. I've always been massively driven to fulfill my potential, and still am.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So did you live in Europe, did you live in France for extended periods of time?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I started getting commissions from [Jean-Luc] Monterosso and Paris Audiovisuel to do different projects; Burgundy, Paris, and I never lived there; I would spend a month or so. But at one time, I was offered an apartment called an appartement de bonne for—it's—the city of Paris owns real estate, and sometimes they give it to people for their lifetimes. And I realized—this could've been considered a mistake, I realized at the time that I always wanted to be the tourist. I didn't want France to ever become quotidian, I didn't want it, I didn't want that side of it, I wanted to look at it from my side of the situation.

TERRIE SULTAN:  How interesting.

RALPH GIBSON:  And I declined the apartment. Now, of course, I would love to have it but—and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  But that's an interesting point of view. I'd like to interrogate that a little bit further, that you actually made a conscious decision that you did not want to feel that being in France was an everyday thing.

RALPH GIBSON:  I—you know, it's just another variation on that incredible correspondence that has existed since day one of this country between France and America. I just say—and then we say, American artists in France. I mean, one is very well received there if one is—if one is and— [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  And not if one's not.

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  And—you know. I mean I'll be very candid, I remember sitting in the Parc Monceau once looking at this elderly guy in his eighties, very slim, in a tweed jacket, and Légion d'honneur, reading Proust with his wingtip shoes, man, very senior. He looked like Fred Astaire or something, and I said, "Now, that's the way to go in old age, sitting in the Parc Monceau reading Proust.

[00:10:12]

Well, I've received the Légion d'honneur recently, and I contemplate this idea of—but you see, there's something in the American grain that I'm—I never want it to go away. I like my velocity, and I like my attitude about things, especially now that the playing field is getting equal, and we're not such an imperialistic, you know, example of everything great, it suits me. But as we get more globalized, I still am extracting inspiration and knowledge from the—from Europe, the great cultures of Europe.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So aside from France, where have you been drawn to in the European cultures?

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh, Italia, I mean, I spent a lot of time in the '80s and '90s in Italy and had a lot of shows there, and did projects, and speak Italian. And I learned both French and Italian through the years, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  How?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, Italian was—that's a funny story. Italian is very easy, it's not a donne difficili. It's—I wanted to work with Antonioni when I was in art school in 1960. So I had this friend Tony Luraschi, who's an Italian American, whose father's Italian and big producer in Italy. So Tony said, "Well, learn Italian and then I'll get my dad to help you get a job shooting set stills in Rome." So I went to the scuola de serale. I went to night school in San Francisco for six weeks, four nights a week, and I learned Italian. In those days, as a 21-year-old kid, you learn everything really fast, you hold on to it, and then through the years, I've added to it. You know, when Castelli was alive, we spoke Italian every day at lunch, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Did you have lunch with Castelli at Da Silvano's every day?

RALPH GIBSON:  It was—well, it was Silvano's or it was Mezzogiorno around the corner, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  And how did that come about that you had lunch with him every day?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, it wasn't every day, we—

TERRIE SULTAN:  But often.

RALPH GIBSON:  I would go to the gallery three or four nights a week on West Broadway, then we always had lunch on Saturdays; that was fixed and firm. And then I'd stay in his house with Mary Jane [Marcasiano] in the South of France, and we just spoke Italian a lot, Ileana spoke Italian too, you know, and so they were my 19th-century gentlepeople, right? You see, I've always—and it would be fun, because we'd be sitting there after lunch and they'd be kind of dozy. I'd say, "Now," I'd say, "I have a question about the Austro-Hungarian Empire," and they both wake up, sit up straight, you know, and give me the answer. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  And the French, same thing, night school, or how did that come about?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, this is equally hilarious. I was working in France all the time, occasionally on TV and stuff like that, I never learned French, and it got to a point where it was no longer cool. "If Gibson is going to be in town all the time, he better learn to speak French." And so around 1990, I was working on my—doing a lot of nudes, and a woman came to pose for me, she was about 28, and I saw immediately she was completely bilingual. Her—she's—her mother was French and her father was English, she grew up on La Manche, you know, in the channel, and she was just—to be bilingual, you have to essentially have the same number of words in your vocabulary in both languages. And so I said, "Here's the deal. If you come every morning at nine o'clock, five days a week, I'll give you $25, I'll guarantee you that, that's $600—$400—$600 a month, I'll get you more students." And she was going to work as a waitress, and I didn't—I never did photograph her as a model. "And I'll get you more students." I got her Eric, and I got her Mary Jane, and, you know, her name was France. And for a year and a half, or two years, I took that many lessons, five a week, and I was in my fifties, early sixties, and I would have—I wouldn't take the conditional once, I'd take it 10 times, you know, but now I read in French this morning, I read an hour of French every day.

TERRIE SULTAN:  That's the way to keep it up.

RALPH GIBSON:  I'm going to do a project, I was just invited last week to do a project on Mallarmé, in Valvins, in his home, and that's for next year. And it's quite—it's still a very interesting culture. We spent much of last November there, and we're there in June of this year for my French book, and I'm still inspired by it. I was so nervous—

[00:15:00]

[END OF TRACK aaa_gibson22_1of2_sd_track08_m.]

RALPH GIBSON:  —going after the pandemic, because I lost total interest in New York. And now, to go to Paris, was the same thing going to happen? It didn't, Paris still got me going, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  What about New York made you lose interest? Was it because everything was shut down, or do you feel like it was used up for you?

RALPH GIBSON:  That's a multiple choice, and the answer is yes to all of the above.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah, I didn't mean to pose that as a multiple-choice question, but—

RALPH GIBSON:  But it's true, but also, I'm at a certain point in my life, I—you know, I am producing—if I were working in film, on analog now, it was Tri-X, I would need five or six assistants to match the productivity output of digital. So I don't need the city because now we're globalized, and we communicate all over the world. People love coming out here, the odd collector, curator. I'm having a big show at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg next, and the curator came here, you know, 300 prints in—big catalog. And they love coming out to the Hamptons and seeing what the life is like, you know, and so she spent a week here going through all my boxes and everything, and—

So I mean, you know at my age, that I have everything except time. I have enough money, I'm healthy, I have everything except time, and I have these—the projects are getting bigger, I have everything I wanted when I was 40, you see. You know, when you look at some hugely successful artists—we know who they are—well, I'm having that kind of success now, but they had it in their thirties and forties when it was easier to—

TERRIE SULTAN:  You probably appreciate it more now than you would've if you—if it had happened to you in your thirties—

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, I'm sure of it—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —and forties.

RALPH GIBSON:  —yeah. I mean, I had a fat head then, I mean—so I mean, you know, I mean. [Laughs.] It's a funny kind of thing, but—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So let's talk a little bit about the switchover from analog to digital. Was that life-changing, and—

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —I mean, was it a struggle, was it difficult to do?

RALPH GIBSON:  None of the above. What happened was—

TERRIE SULTAN:  I keep posing these questions as multiple—

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you're just asking—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —choice. [Laughs.]

RALPH GIBSON:  —figuring out how to ask the question the best way. What really happened was Leica approached me. They said, "We want to have—make a black-and-white camera, Monochrom, and we want to put your name on it, in an edition of 50." I said, "I'm really not interested," and they said—"I'm—and I'm leaving shortly for Australia." They said, "Well, could we send you the prototype?" I said, "Sure," you know. So I went to Australia and some guy said—I was lecturing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which is kind of like the Met, you know, a really big museum and big audience, several hundred people. I said, "Any questions?" "Yes, sir." "What's your name, sir?" "I'm Dive [ph]." "Excuse me?" "I'm Dive. My name is Dive." My name's Dave.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Oh.

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  "Okay, Dave, what's the question?" He says, "What do you think of digital?" And I had a prepared answer. I said, "The history of photography has been etched into the emulsion of black-and-white film, and digital will consistently resist the epic proportion," end of discussion, off at the knees. So then I come back to New York and sitting in my studio waiting for me is a prototype of the Leica Monochrom. So I unboxed it, and I put it on automatic, you know, A, I knew to do that. So I carry it with me and I go to see my shrink. I said, "You know, I've got 50 years in the darkroom, my prints all have consistency from 1960 to today. I'm 75 years old, I can't switch, so I have to decide." So I walk out of her office, and I'm taking a picture of this manhole cover with my first picture of my Monochrom, and that picture occurs, and I look at the back of the display, and I said, "That looks like it could have been taken by me." Now, in 1961, I made this photograph in San Francisco.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So this would be Untitled from San Francisco, 19—

RALPH GIBSON:  '61.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —61?

RALPH GIBSON:  And that's 2012, and it's essentially—

TERRIE SULTAN:  And this is—

RALPH GIBSON:  —this—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —analog and this is digital.

RALPH GIBSON:  Digital, and it's essentially the same compositional structure, architecture, composition, right? It clearly looks from the same eye.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yes.

RALPH GIBSON:  So, I realized then and there, yes, digital will reflect my vision. It'll correspond to my intention specifically, and big time. And so I did that book in a year, and so all of a sudden—

TERRIE SULTAN:  That book you're speaking of is Ralph Gibson MONO, from Lustrum.

[00:05:00]

RALPH GIBSON:  So it—since that time, I've—I haven't loaded a roll of film in a camera since 2012.

TERRIE SULTAN:  You don't miss the darkroom?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes, I don't.

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  I would never go back in the darkroom.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And so you do—what you would do in the darkroom, you're now doing on a computer?

RALPH GIBSON:  Correct, and as the experience advances, I'm doing less and less adjustments anyway and more and more just at the moment of exposure with my eye, because that's really where the picture is made, right?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Interesting, so there's very little manipulation that's going on, and—

RALPH GIBSON:  No, I—it's like, you know, at what point does it stop to be manipulation and turn into compositing, you know? I'm sure in the museum world, you saw tons of digital compositing, right, people with their Photoshop spectacularly, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, let's talk about Andreas, you know, Gursky, for one.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, he sort of vindicated it though, Gursky vindicated it. I mean, there's—we've discussed him previously, and—but my most recent digital picture, which I want to show you in this book, I mean, the most—not my most recent but my most important recent one is this, which is taken with a 135mm lens on—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Untitled, from The Vertical Horizon in 2017. And whereas you've said that black and white is really your signature approach, you are using color.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, now it's half and half, yeah, yeah. Color got good in digital. I used to have these arguments at lunch with Eric over—he said, "Oh, your photomechanical colors and C-prints are so awful—"

TERRIE SULTAN:  Eric being Eric Fischl.

RALPH GIBSON:  "—compared to what you can do with a tube of paint," you know. But now in the digital space, like, look at this picture on the back cover. This is my homage to Morandi, you know, that's a—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah.

RALPH GIBSON:  —I could send these colors in any direction I wanted, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah.

RALPH GIBSON:  And there's a whole other language in there too, that—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So working digitally with color is a lot easier than working with color in the darkroom?

RALPH GIBSON:  Not only easier, infinitely better.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Why is that?

RALPH GIBSON:  Because you're not restricted to photo dye couplers and photomechanical, chemical colors. Now, you can basically—we're working in ink, which is a whole other situation.

TERRIE SULTAN:  It's like painting.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, and it's just a whole other linguistic, you know, it's just a whole other—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, I'm looking at this image Untitled, from the Sacred Land, from 2019.

RALPH GIBSON:  What's—

TERRIE SULTAN:  It's—

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —a monk's robe with the white tie. The colors are so subtle, it's almost like a sepia-toned print where the brown and the gray just melds together. That would seem to me to be something that would be extremely difficult to do in a darkroom.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes, yes, you wouldn't quite get it the way—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you're enjoying color after all—

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh, very much—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —those years—

RALPH GIBSON:  —so.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —in black and white?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I started working in France in color. My first really big project, I got a grant from Kodak and—to do a L'Histoire de France in 1989, 1990, so. But one of the things you'll see in this, in this book is how much I'm influenced by painting and literature and semiotics and stuff like. So, I mean, digital is an imaging system; film is a different voice altogether. What's interesting, it's always been about—interesting about photography is when the photographer takes a picture of something and the picture is better than the original something.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Isn't that what you strive for?

RALPH GIBSON:  It is, and it has to do with the inherent nature of the medium, and to what extent one can connect with and control that phenomenon really; really, how we evaluate a photographer ultimately, maybe not consciously, but that's what we have, and so—

[00:10:04]

I mean, somewhere in this book, I say learn how your lens sees, and your lens will learn how your eye sees, you know. I mean, it—they're just—it's one of those things, and I'm interested in the evolution of a visual language during this period with all—in my TED Talk, I said there's no longer any visual illiterates, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  No, they used to teach digital literacy in school, but now, I guess they don't need to do that anymore.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, it would—who would take it? They are—they could teach it, they could, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you said that filmmakers had a big, big influence on you early on in the beginnings of your career and your development of your approach. Are there—historically, are there painters that had meaning for you?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes, I have always been obsessed with one or two painters in any given period of my career. I think ultimately you see in here, and I'm interested in what they call asemic writing, A-S-E-M-I-C, which means it's a writing system that's not connected to a spoken language. And so if you take a Twombly, at what point does it—does this painting turn to words or words turn to painting? He lives in that space, and I'm applying this idea to all visual experience, and I'm also doing it in music because I'm—I work as a guitar player also, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you mentioned very briefly, and I didn't follow up, but I should have, that at the same time you were studying photography, you studied classical guitar.

RALPH GIBSON:  Right, right, yeah. It's something I wanted to learn very much in that period. And I was telling a story at dinner last night; I came out of the Navy, I had about 20 pieces that I knew on the classical guitar, and I went to art school, and starving, and so, you know that painter Bill Wiley? Bill and I had a gig every Sunday for pizza in a bar, and then about that time, this German guy, art student who worked as a waiter on a luxury liner said, "You know you could get a job, I could get you a job in the lounge of this ship playing your classical guitar, and you're paid 100 and a quarter a week," which in those days would be about the same thing as 6[00], 700 a week now, you know. And so I had come to a fork in the road, so I said, "No, I really want to be a photographer," so I didn't take it.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Were you self-taught on the guitar?

RALPH GIBSON:  Pretty much. I had started when I was 13, and I took a few lessons, the guy taught me how to read. But then I never—then I let it drift away, and then I would buy the sheet music in the Navy of a classical piece, and I'd also buy the record, and between the record and the sheet music, I could—I'd learn these pieces.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Now, you're in the Navy, how did you have so much time to do these things? [Laughs.]

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I was a photographer's mate, and there wasn't a lot of work for me to do, but I would stay in an air-conditioned darkroom while we're in the Gulf of Crotch or whatever the hell we were, you know, and I would be doing—pursuing my thing. I had this horrible feeling of insecurity, because all my friends were now in college and doing well in college, and I'd come home on leave, and I would barely understand their language, but I had been around the world, but it was different, you know, and so—

So I have always since that period to this morning, or right up to the—been autodidactic in that there's always something I have to study. I'm reading Julia Kristeva right now, who is just so, so brilliant. You know her work, Julia Kristeva? Well, she's big on semiotics and linguistics and deconstruction and stuff, so. That feeling of inferiority sent me to an incredibly—it opened the door to a pursuit for information that I couldn't have—I wouldn't have pursued otherwise. I wonder now, if I had gone to Oxford—what—where I would be sitting, what would I be doing.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, that was going to be my question. So you were obviously a very adept autodidact, you've taught yourself languages, you've taught yourself, you know, basically how to play the classical guitar, you taught yourself how to be a photographer in the way you wanted to be. But you never had the impetus to go back to school and—

[00:15:00]

[END OF TRACK aaa_gibson22_1of2_sd_track09_m.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  —seek organized higher education?

RALPH GIBSON:  It would be much too slow for me. I mean, I have two honorary doctorates, you know? I mean, one of the things I realized—I started giving workshops in the early '70s, and I've done them in, like, 20 countries around the world—is that to study anything two hours a week, one day a week is—that wouldn't get me anywhere. I mean, nowadays with YouTube and things like that, you can just voraciously subs—consume massive quantities of information and get answers to questions, and—but I mean, there's certain things—that's okay for an artist. I mean, if you want to be a lawyer or a brain surgeon, you better go to school.

TERRIE SULTAN:  You mentioned that there were two painters or paintings that had consistently been engaging, but you didn't say what they were.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, for example, when I was in the Navy, I went to the MoMA, and I saw the music lesson, The Piano Lesson by Matisse, you know, with that little patch of rock and everything, and it's the first painting I understood. I completely—everything he was intending that that picture do got into my perceptual apparatus. And so then when I moved to New York later, penniless, I would walk from the Chelsea up to MoMA and go in, and hang out in the empty galleries for days on end. I'd do de Chirico, I'd do Monet, I'd do Magritte, I'd do all the Abstract Expressionists. And I hold a view that the works that—with which we had our early epiphanies are the works that we like most later in life. And I came of age in the days of Franz Kline and de Kooning and people like that, and I speak that language, I understand that painting extremely well, you know, and still enjoy it to the extent that I'm not very interested in what's going on content-wise in art these days. I'm not seeing the depth of content supported by paintings now that I am accustomed to when I study all the great masterpieces and stuff, you know what I mean? I can fall to my knees crying in front of a Matisse, but not in front of a puppy—sausage puppy, or something. It just isn't the way I'm constructed.

TERRIE SULTAN:  When you moved to New York with basically no money whatsoever, was it scary for you?

RALPH GIBSON:  It wasn't, because I always knew, it sounds really pompous, but I always knew I was going to succeed in photography. I thought it was going to be first as a fashion photographer, then I thought I was going to be the photojournalist, but then it turned out to not be true. But, you know, it was a very funny story because I'm in the Chelsea, and I got this appointment to show my work to this picture editor at the Herald Tribune named Clay Felker, who became a very famous editor.

TERRIE SULTAN:  He founded New York magazine.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes, and in those days, New York magazine was a Sunday supplement—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Oh, that I didn't know.

RALPH GIBSON:  —and so. So I went to—I'm standing in front of the Chelsea, I hail a cab, I said, "Take me down to number Two Water Street," a little Jewish guy, Jan Saudek, he goes, "Water Street? You going down to the Trib?" I said, "How'd you know that?" He said, "You want to know what, 44 years behind this wheel, that's what." So he takes me down there, I show my work to Felker, and he says, "I like your work, kid, you got any ideas?" I thought I had a camera, he had the ideas; I was looking for an assignment. I said, "Sure, Mr. Felker," and I closed my eyes, and a flash went off inside my head, a white light went off inside my head. I said, "Let's do a piece on the four oldest cabdrivers in New York." He says, "I like the way you think, you got an assignment, and there's this young writer I'm going to assign to you, his name is Nick Pileggi." And Nick and I became a team, and we did a bunch of pieces, and that's about the time I was getting in Magnum and all that stuff. But even though I could do that, it wasn't giving me satisfaction that I wanted. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew I wasn't getting it. Then my work changed, it gets more surreal, and I did The Somnambulist and then the rest—I never looked back. But that's it, and that's why I moved to New York. You—that story would've never happened in LA.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah.

RALPH GIBSON:  That's only this guy. You know, in those days with a stick shift, those cabdrivers were great drivers, they were. They had to be respected for the incredible skill with which they—and so. I tell that story to cabdrivers even to—whenever I'm talking to a chauffeur or something, that you know, I tell that story.

[00:05:03]

TERRIE SULTAN:  How did you find the old cabdrivers?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, Felker went to the Hack Bureau, the cab bureau, and we found a guy who had been 54 years with a horse. We got a picture of him with a horse, you know, and—an old Irish guy, and it was a very popular piece. And then they—then I learned about the Belmore Cafeteria on Park Avenue where they all hung out, where there's spouts in the water—when the wall—for water were seltzer, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Those were the days.

RALPH GIBSON:  And we did a piece on seltzer in New York, all the different ways you'd get seltzer in those blue bottles, and 88 pounds per bottle and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So that all sounds very amusing, but it—

RALPH GIBSON:  It wasn't art.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —it wasn't what you were looking for.

RALPH GIBSON:  No, no, that's true, it wasn't art, and—but I knew, you see, I knew that I will always—the idea of being anything but a photographer was—would be like, should I really go in at this point and have a complete sex change, you know? Do I want to have surgery and become a—? I mean, it was just as radical. Nothing would ever come between me and my work, and I was a bachelor until I was almost 40. I mean, I just simply—ah. I only wanted that, but I really wanted it, and that degree of desire and fanaticism has helped me understand things like suicide bombers and the IRA, things like that, because I have that degree of passion, just not for that particular cause of theirs, but I am a kindred spirit in that regard.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Single-minded dedication.

RALPH GIBSON:  That's all there is to it, and it's given me an incredibly full life. It's given me the whole world, you know? And I—I've met many people who, highly accomplished in all of the arts and other fields, and to a greater or lesser degree they know exactly what I'm talking about, you know, we—that's—I'm not the only person who ever had that.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you were a bachelor until you were 40, what did entering into a relationship—how did that change anything about the way you approached your life?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I met Mary Jane when I was—late 39, and she was just starting her business, and she was very successful very early on in her early twenties, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  What was the business that she was starting?

RALPH GIBSON:  She was doing her own knitwear design, and she was getting a lot of attention, and her business was building very fast. And then all of a sudden, because I wasn't running around and living that crazy nightlife and stuff like that, I started earning some interesting money for the first time at 40.

TERRIE SULTAN:  That was significant at that period of time.

RALPH GIBSON:  That—yeah, that was a big deal, and then I started showing with Leo, I've been showing with. And so things—it helped me out, my work a lot, and she was busy, and we started traveling a lot together, and she would get a license in Japan, so I'd go with her in Japan or—and we made a deal that we'd travel together as much as we could, you know. And so we've been together 45 years or something, and so that worked out.

TERRIE SULTAN:  That's very remarkable.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, it worked out, you know, she's just—so. I mean, I believe that a lot of times, parents say to me, guys I know, "Would you mind talking to my kid? He's 30 years old, he doesn't know what he—" I mean, if somebody didn't know what they wanted to do by the time they're 30, you kind of have a situation. But you can't expect everybody to find their destiny that quickly. Some people know it, and others just don't.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, as you said, you've—it came to you in a flash when you were 17 years old.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  I would say that's very unusual.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes. I—but, you know, I always felt—I always knew that I was different in that way, even as a little kid. I didn't know what was—what difference meant, or why or who, you know. I was very trancey, I'd be overwide, I'd stare at things, I didn't have many friends, I was chubby, but I always knew I was different. And I didn't know at the time that difference, that desire to be different was the desire to be an artist, but when I started making some of my early photographs, and I'd look at them, I realized that that's—I had the feeling I'm having now is what I had when I was 11 years old, staring at the wall or something, you know?

[00:10:09]

And so I think that we are all born with that to a greater or lesser degree, but we don't all get to find out what that specifically is in terms of pursuit, career, discipline. But I do feel that everybody is equally creative, given the proper set of circumstances. I think people are pretty similar in many, many, many, many, many, many ways, and the differences are very subtle.

But I remember being on a train coming back from Washington, and I had the dummy of Somnambulist. And sitting next to me in the train is this woman with a big beehive hairdo and long artificial nails and a muumuu, and I had the dummy of the book. She says—I said, "Do you want to see this?" She says, "Yeah." I said, "What do you think of that?" She says, "Very interesting, I don't know what you're trying to say, but it's very interesting."

TERRIE SULTAN:  Now what in the world made you decide to just speak to this person?

RALPH GIBSON:  Because I could see she was looking over my shoulder at the—while I was looking at the book. So I knew then and there that that woman couldn't have been more different socially, that, you know, we're—we live in different worlds, but I knew, then and there, I was not a misunderstood artist. I don't necessarily have a common touch, but I'm not beyond the reach of the common person, you know? That there are photographers who can do high art and low art simultaneously, just reach everybody in the society, you know, the common—Shakespeare had the common touch, but I never strove to achieve that.

TERRIE SULTAN:  What would you say would be low art in the world of photography?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, it's been a long time since I actually even—oh, amateur flower photography, or stuff like that, you know? You will see low art in—where you see these Photoshop zebras in a print that's five feet for $400, you know, in vivid saturations, that's kind of low. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Got it.

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, pretty vivid example, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, I think this would be a good place to stop for this chapter.

RALPH GIBSON:  Great.

TERRIE SULTAN:  When we get back together again, I want to go back all the way, back to your childhood and talk a little bit more about your very formative years, and you used the word trancey, which I definitely want to explore a little bit more—

RALPH GIBSON:  Sure, sure, sure.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —when we talk again. But this has been great, thank you so much.

RALPH GIBSON:  Good deal, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  We'll—

RALPH GIBSON:  Let's have lunch.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Let's have lunch.

RALPH GIBSON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

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TERRIE SULTAN:  Everything is—

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —copacetic.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So this is Terrie Sultan, I'm here with Ralph Gibson on Wednesday, August 3, 2022, in his studio [. . . –Ed.] in East Hampton, New York. Hi, Ralph, welcome back.

RALPH GIBSON:  Good morning, Terrie. I'm looking forward to our second discussion. I enjoyed the first one immensely.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Good, I'm glad, and so what I wanted to do today, if you don't mind, I want to go back a little bit to—

RALPH GIBSON:  Sure.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —how you came to be. Now, I know you were born in Los Angeles, and your dad worked in the film business. Tell me some more about growing up. Did you have brothers and sisters?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, I was an only child and chubby—a chubby only child, and I spent a lot of time alone. And the thing that I remember about my childhood, that is perhaps most relevant to our conversation, was that I used to have long periods where it was called overwide, where my eyes—I just look at things, and I told my mother I was feeling trancey.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Trancey, that's such an interesting word.

RALPH GIBSON:  As in a trance, trancey. And I didn't know why or how, and it would sneak up on me. And it's so interesting that it was only when I was 21, and had made what I consider my first photograph that was strong enough to show any hope when I was in art school, that I realized that that connected to those trancey feelings I had as a child.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Did you invent that word, trancey?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, that was the only way I knew how to describe what I was feeling emotionally. You know, you've probably spoken with hundreds of artists in the course of your career, if not thousands, and everybody's got slightly different reasons for doing it or how they got there, or whatever it was. Well, you know, I studied magic, which coincided with my trancey-ness. I did sleight of hand, and I occasionally performed as—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Okay—

RALPH GIBSON:  —a magician.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —let's talk a little bit more about the magic. What made you decide to do that?

RALPH GIBSON:  It just fascinated me. There was magicians on TV. We had early television, a little round screen, seven inches, black-and-white, circle, and the two things that happened during that period was I discovered music and magic. And I still do tricks for kids, you know, but, you see, then, I was also raised Catholic, which had a very strong ritualistic, surrealistic component to it. Now I have stated before that my surrealist proclivities are entirely rooted in the fact that my mother is from Central America. I'm Latin, half Latin, she's from Costa Rica, and I was raised Catholic. Now if you look at the first generation, Buñuel and all these types, they were all Spanish Catholics, and the Catholic ritual is extremely—I mean, you would never go to a temple and see them passing and kissing the Torah and call that surreal, you see. But the Mass is heavily, heavily rooted in rituals that are paravisual, pararealistic, and so. So between all these sentiments, I was an artist very early on, we just didn't know it.

TERRIE SULTAN:  What did your mom do?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, my mother came from Costa Rica, and she had been raised by the nuns. She wrote and spoke exquisite French and Spanish. She never really got a hundred percent on top of English. She was alone a lot, as my father worked, and she was like a housewife, and it's been pointed out to me that she probably didn't have very many friends, but anything she touched would turn to art. She could make anything, She could make a dressing table, she—she made—decided to make a barbecue out of bricks. She was massively creative, my mother, and she was hugely literate. She belonged to the Book of the Month Club, and I started reading books she recommended when I was 11, 12, and I owe a lot to my mother. I know exactly what I got from who, and most of the interesting stuff I got from my mother.

TERRIE SULTAN:  How did your parents meet?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, my mother grew up in San Jose, Costa Rica, and her—supposedly, her father was a—had a plantation, and she had a brother.

[00:05:08]

Her mother had died, and my mother told me the story that that a fellow came over to play the piano in their home one night, and her brother was asleep, and he got up and walked over the balcony and looked down and then came downstairs and started playing with this guy. He was a prodigy, and so—what—supposedly, according to the story, he toured Latin America, and died in his early twenties. But in the course of all this, my mother had met a family friend named Terig Tucci, and I've looked him up, I Wikipedia-d him, to clearly—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Terig, T-E-R-R?

RALPH GIBSON:  It's either one or two R-I-G, Terig Tucci. And Terig Tucci had moved to New York to—he was a conductor, and so he invited my mother to join him, sort of as an au pair, my mom was 18 or 19 at the time, so she went. And then when Tucci went to Hollywood to score films, my mom went with him, and somewhere along the line, she met my father.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Fascinating story.

RALPH GIBSON:  And this is—the better story is that when my father moved out to find his father, who had left Philadelphia, he was working in real estate in Hollywood in the late twenties, 1920s, and my dad was on the Santa Monica Pier, which is still there, with—and there was a Spanish guy fishing, and they started talking. And the guy took him home because he had extra fish, and my dad—and they had a 12-year-old girl, and there was a grandfather, Padre Cansino. And this was the Cansino family, and they had this beautiful 12-year-old girl named Rita Hayworth. And so when I was a kid, we spent a lot of time with Rita Hayworth, and when she married Orson Welles, we'd go over to their house sometimes on Sundays, and—see, I had all that Hollywood glamour in a big way until I didn't, until I was about 13, and alcoholism. And I think my parents divorced when I was 15, 14 and a half, or 15, and it was really messy. I had to stand in front of a judge with one parent on either side and tell him which parent I wanted to live with.

TERRIE SULTAN:  They don't do that anymore, but—

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I hope not, because it fucked me up for life.

TERRIE SULTAN:  What—so who did you choose?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, my mother—my father had quit drinking, and my mother was still drinking, so I choose—chose to live with my father, which was a fatal error. I could not have lived with my mother because she's just besotted. But my father really didn't care for my presence, and he had a new wife, and she didn't like me either, so I was out of the house at 16, living in my car and sometimes on my mother's couch, and I started working as a mechanic in a sports car garage. I had signed up for the Navy and had to wait seven months until the morning I turned 17, then I went in the Navy.

So I went from all this glamour to all this complete—head shaved, standing in line, being shouted at with a bunch of rednecks. I mean, it was really a baptism of fire in my case.

TERRIE SULTAN:  It never occurred to you to pursue the movie business at all?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, my dad wanted me to when I came out. He said, I—he was a charter member of the Screen Directors Guild; I was eligible for any guild in Hollywood.

TERRIE SULTAN:  What was your father's name?

RALPH GIBSON:  C. Carter Gibson. You can IMDb him, and it shows some of the stuff he did. It's not entirely complete. Entirely complete, is that redundant? It's not fully entirely complete, that's what I mean to say.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So he wanted you to go into the business?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, he did, and he was—it was just yet another communication break, another insult, that I declined. I didn't say I don't want to be like you. You see, because what really happened was when you work in Hollywood, you work on a movie and then when the movie's over, you're out of work, you see. So it was very feast and famine-y in my house, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  When you chose to live with your dad, what did that do to your relationship with your mother?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I'm sure it broke her heart, but she had, sort of, entered into other relationships by that time, and she was—I mean, I calculated, I don't remember to this minute now, but I calculated when she died, she was I think just 50, or something like that, she was very young. But she looked very, very old and put on a lot of weight, and had completely disintegrated as a result of everything. From—I don't know if you have my book Self-Exposure, but there's periods—pictures, you know, when she was young, she was quite beautiful and—I could give you a copy if you don't.

TERRIE SULTAN:  I don't have a copy, I'd love one.

[00:10:02]

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, I tell a lot of these stories in that book. But, you know, everybody's got their back story, and I don't particularly—I think I got a pretty good deal having been visually—see, I would go on the set, sometimes my dad would invite me on the set, and I—and that's—in those days, it was high-contrast orthochromatic film with arc lights, and so that gave me my contrastiness and things like that, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

RALPH GIBSON:  So—I mean, I remember seeing the camera go in for inserts and closeups and—that, I mean that there's not much mystery to my formation.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, I'm not sure I would agree with that, but there's always mystery.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, well, with any individual, sure, of course.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Now, you have a great facility with languages. When you were at home with your mom, you spoke French and Spanish but not English so well. Did she speak to you in French?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, no, and this is—of all the—all of my back story, the only anger I really harbored towards my mother, because alcoholism was a disease, you see, she was ill, she wasn't treated. So the only, only issues I have with Mom is that she didn't teach me those languages, because I do have an ear; I'm a musician, I speak languages, I could have gotten it and—you know, I could've been on my fifth language by now. But she wanted to pass as American. You know, I was born in '39, we're at war for most of my childhood, and so this was in the days when immigration into America brought a great enthusiasm to assimilate, you know? That—and that's—everybody, that's what America is, a big assimilation.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah, so did the war—that the war was happening out there, did that have an impact on you as a child?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, in Self-Exposure I mention that my earliest childhood memory is sitting at the kitchen table looking at this Gothic wooden radio. You know, the—remember those Gothic-shaped wooden radios? And my parents was—the guy was saying something, and my parents went both into shock staring at the radio, and as a child, you sense the tension. And I don't know if it was 1941, December 7, 1941, or shortly thereafter, but it is my earliest recollection of a childhood memory.

TERRIE SULTAN:  But your dad never went to war?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, no, no, he was herniated, cross-eyed, stuttered, he could barely—he could—he was really—he had a lot to overcome physically, alcoholic himself. I mean, his career was ruined by the fact that he had such a horrible stutter and—the only time he didn't stutter was when he was drunk.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Maybe that's why he drank.

RALPH GIBSON:  Probably.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Now, so let's—so with all that alcoholism in your family, did that have something to do with your making a decision to stop drinking?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you know, the COA thing, child—children of alcoholics have a higher proclivity, and I was drinking an awful lot. And Larry Clark, a friend of mine who's been in and out of rehab many times, AA and all these things, he used to say to me, he said, "Man," he said, "the truth is you're really not an alcoholic, but boy, you drink a lot." And I would drink all day, I really would. This would've been a pretext to open up a bottle of wine even though it's only 11, but—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, in Australia, they call that elevenses.

RALPH GIBSON:  Eleven E?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Elevenses.

RALPH GIBSON:  Eleven Z?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

RALPH GIBSON:  Eleven Z, yeah. So I really—no, but I also—you know, I started doing yoga in my twenties, and I inherited a good physique from my mother, and I just didn't want to lose it.

TERRIE SULTAN:  There's a little vanity in there.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, oh, not a little. This is purely—the decision was purely made—I was getting fat and old, neither of which I found particularly appealing, and so I find it was very little effort, but daily effort. I—I'm holding on to my physical strength, and this has a lot to do with my fulfilling my potential as an artist and as a photographer.

TERRIE SULTAN:  The writing aspect of your career is fascinating to me, especially knowing that you left high school at 16 to go into the Navy. You maybe don't remember, but you probably got your GED when you got out of the service—

RALPH GIBSON:  I think I—

[00:15:00]

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RALPH GIBSON:—had to, to go to art school, right?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Right.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  But was it all the reading that you did when you were a kid that made you such a good writer, or where did you think that that came from?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, there was a period in Los Angeles where I lived with a guru, as did so many others in the early '60s. When I—around 22 to 24, I lived in this mansion with a guru who—

TERRIE SULTAN:  What was his name?

RALPH GIBSON:  He's—he will—he remains anonymous.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Ah.

RALPH GIBSON:  And he said, "Anything you understand, you can put in words," and I embraced that, that concept, because no matter how abstract it gets, I'm—I've just been commissioned to do a piece on Mallarmé, and this—it's right where I want to be. I remember when you were at the museum, you had that Morton Feldman guy hanging those pieces; I know that music, and so that's the homage to Pollock. Yeah, I know that piece very well. So, between Mallarmé and Feldman, and—I enjoy mentation. I enjoy the mental process. As these memory traces and thought processes travel through my synapses, I find it very sensual. And sometimes, if I get a good idea or if I learn something that I've wanted to know, it gives me the same feeling as when you—you know, when sometimes you go down to the mail in the old days and you go open an envelope, and there was a big check in the mail? You know, that sense of well—well, that's what happens to me when I learn something, or get a good idea. [Laughs.] It really is.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And you want to write it down—

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I realized—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —or—

RALPH GIBSON:  —years ago—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —interrogate it while you're—?

RALPH GIBSON:  —writers, novelists, writers of any sort are basically thinkers, and the only way they can keep track of what they're thinking is to write it down. The first impulse is the thought, you see. It's completely opposite from painting where you just—you need—all you want to see is what paint will do. Whereas with thinking—and I'll tell you, Terrie, to this day, the only thing I will candidly admit to being jealous of are people who are smarter, better thinkers than myself.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And who would that be?

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh, I read them every day, I rub elbows with them on a regular basis, Roland Barthes, the perfect example; you know, Jacques Derrida, they're just all over the place, Merleau-Ponty, all the phenomenologists, and I read them constantly.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Do you ever read novels for fun?

RALPH GIBSON:  With great reluctance, and I—and a sense of certain—that I'm wasting my time, because novels for fun come under entertainment, and so I don't remember them. I don't really get anything from them, and at this point in life, the last thing we're doing is killing time. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah, well, what do you do for fun?

RALPH GIBSON:  I compose a lot on the guitar. I—I'll look at—I'll binge series on Netflix or something like that, but only if there's something in it for me. Like, the only series that I really look at are in French, and so that's—

TERRIE SULTAN:  To keep your language up?

RALPH GIBSON:  —so that I'm, you know, advancing that, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So, Call My Agent! was a good—

RALPH GIBSON:  Sure, and the weird thing is I saw it twice, the whole thing twice, not even remembering the first thing, because it goes in one eye and out the other, you know. Now I discovered a long time ago, in evaluating and attempting to ameliorate my creative process, that I could only do so much and then the quality would decline, or something like that, you know. I've discussed this with many, many artists for the last 50 years, all my colleagues, whoever, "How do you do it?" And when I meet somebody great like Henri [Cartier-Bresson] or somebody like that, we all go straight to the creative process, that's pretty much if I really respect the person, and if we've got—if we got the thing going, that's what we talk about, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So when you say you can only do so much, what does that mean? It sounds like you have acknowledged that there's some sort of limitations in what you can accomplish.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, that's rhetorical. The truth is I don't acknowledge that, but I do know when I've run out of steam. I do it—I do know in my quality, is that—when I'm qualitatively effective as—and when I'm not, let's just put it that way.

[00:05:04]

For example, I was offered a very large sum to go to Malaysia to lecture for couple days and be on TV and stuff like that, 50 grand, you know. I passed because I knew that it would take too much out, you see. The trip going, being there, coming back, recovering, all that stuff, you know, I—first of all, the amount of work you do on something like that, if I had to have tried that hard, I could've made that money here and, you know, if I had to push myself that hard, you know what I mean, so. So I've always—I had an experience, which is worth mentioning for this interview, which is after I dropped out of Magnum, I was very just disillusioned with photojournalism, and my work was changing towards the surreal. And a friend of mine was involved down in the theater, St. Mark's theater in the Bowery. That's where Sam Shepard started, and I knew Sam back in those days, and—so a bunch of the actors and directors rented a farmhouse in Pennsylvania to rehearse and live communally. And I went down there for a weekend, and I took all the pictures, the Hand Through the Doorway, the Floating Nude, I did 24 of the 48 pictures of The Somnambulist in a weekend, and I was at my source, I was at my creative source. Everywhere I looked, everywhere I pointed my camera, I made photographs of considerable strength in terms of my overall.

Now, I understood then that the people that I admire, the Shakespeares, the Picassos, the people who left massive bodies of work behind, were able to go to that place on call. You know, you've been in the art scene long enough, the more exceeds the less, and you know who—you know, this idea of, "I let it build, man, I only develop my film every six months." Well, you know, good for you, but if I mention that guy's name, you'd never heard of him—[laughs]—you know, so. I mean, what I did was I—in answer to this, I'll—I set up a lifestyle within which nothing would come between me and the work. So at least I eliminated that excuse, you see?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

RALPH GIBSON:  All the credit, all the blame, we've discussed this, my autonomy thing. Now you see, I once said to a friend of mine from France, "I want to fulfill my potential," and he thought it was the rudest, ugliest, most pretentious thing he had ever heard. Coming from French culture, the idea of fulfilling your potential is not how they think. That to fulfill your potential in a country that has an academy, would be that you're serving the academy, that would—you know. We discussed this last week. I'm just a Yankee artist, and originality is the big deal, right?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

RALPH GIBSON:  So I know how prolific I am, but, you know, I read this line recently that in—a work of art is never finished, it's abandoned. You really never get to the end of anything. I don't get answers to the questions I ask in my work, but I get better definitions of the question. The question gets—

TERRIE SULTAN:  That's what keeps you going, right, because you're still looking for the—

RALPH GIBSON:  Absolutely.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —answer.

RALPH GIBSON:  And then there's an endorphin thing, because you—when I do make a strong photograph that satisfies my requirement, it feels very good. It sustains me until the next one, you know. And when I don't work, when I don't print, when—if I'm doing other things, traveling, exhibiting, whatever, if I'm busy in other aspects and I don't put up new work for a little while, I start getting crabby, I start getting out of sorts, you know, purely subconscious impulse too, so. So that's—the creative process is something that one defines and modulates and is constantly changing, and my decision to move out here was, to a certain extent, influenced by the—how well I worked out here, you know, my set-up and—you know.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So do you feel that that changed over COVID, that the working arrangement that you had in the city no longer worked for you, or didn't work as well?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I had a studio there, and I would—I could—I could've—if we hadn't been stuck in the loft during COVID, I would have walked to my studio every day, you know, that sort of thing. But no, I like the air, I like the light, I like the nature. The—these are—this is like nutrition, this is like the kind of food you eat, you know, it has the same effect on your performance, you know?

[00:10:16]

I could probably—the only city I might consider living in again would be Paris. I toy with the idea of moving there, but I've never wanted my travels to become quotidian, I mentioned that. I don't want France to look like that I know it too well.

TERRIE SULTAN:  You know, that's so funny because that is the opposite of the way I travel. I joined the Peace Corps when I was 24 because I wanted to know what it was like to live day to day in—

RALPH GIBSON:  In another country?

TERRIE SULTAN:  —another country, and your approach to your visitations to all of the many, many places that you have been has always been—

RALPH GIBSON:  Fresh eye.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —fresh eye.

RALPH GIBSON:  That's what I want, yeah, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So going to the grocery store, having to do your laundry, finding a housekeeper, those things in another culture are just not of interest to you?

RALPH GIBSON:  I just saw this quote by Proust this morning: "Don't look for new landscapes, look with new eyes," you know.

TERRIE SULTAN:  That's a wonderful quote.

RALPH GIBSON:  I mean, that's a guy who lay in his cork-lined room and did the whole thing.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. When—you've put together, you're working now on organizing an exhibition of work for Paris?

RALPH GIBSON:  All my work from France, and it'll go into my museum, and it'll also be shown at the Leica gallery in New York next spring when they open the new space. I'll have the opening show.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So what's it like to go down memory lane, all the work from Paris? How does that feel while you're working on that?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, when I worked on my autobiography, you see, one of the things about being a photographer is that you're constantly revisiting previous moments and you're seeing them—I've always wanted to live in the present tense, and the past is ever present in me in a more vivid way. I've never stated it quite like that, but it's true. Because being a photographer, because constantly—my old photographs look as fresh to me as they did when they were.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Now, is there anything that you've then gone back to review that doesn't work for you anymore that you've decided to put aside?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, not necessarily. I do notice that—I use the term exigence; exigence, it's a great word in French. But I've always had a very tight frame, and as I've been working on my French project, the book layout, I've noticed that I can tighten up those pictures maybe eight or 10 percent, and they pop even more. I love the idea of the perfect frame, the perfect, in which every square centimeter of the picture is as tight as a drum, you know. That's something that—I continue to make new discoveries about how to achieve that with different focal lengths and different subject matter. How you do that with leaves, how do you do that with clouds, how do you do that with the foam at the seashore, you know, how—? I want a very tight exigent, ineluctable frame. And I don't care what it's a picture of; back to the grotesque thing, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you just tossed out the phrase "my museum," can you talk about what that's going to be?

RALPH GIBSON:  It's going to be open on October first—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Of 2022?

RALPH GIBSON:  —in South Korea, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So it's not only under construction, it's almost complete.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah. We're shipping—see all these boxes? That's memorabilia that's going into the vitrines and stuff like that.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So tell me the story of how this came about.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I had been showing in Korea in a private family museum and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  What was the family?

RALPH GIBSON:  It's—I think—here's what I'll do. I will give you all this information as soon as the press release is ready, which is in about a week, all right?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, you can tell me, and I'll just hold the—I'll just hold this. I won't send it off to the Smithsonian until you—

RALPH GIBSON:  I mean, it doesn't really matter much, but it's a foundation called the GoEun Foundation, and they're—they proposed the—I'll show you the pictures of the—

[00:15:00]

[END OF TRACK aaa_gibson22_2of2_sd_track04_m.]

RALPH GIBSON:  —the architectural renderings in the other room. It came as a result of the pandemic, and they proposed it, and they'll have about a thousand prints and a lot of memorabilia and permanent exhibitions. And it's a big thing in my little career, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah, it's a big thing. So well, this museum will be exclusively for you, like the Clyfford Still Museum in—

RALPH GIBSON:  Well—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —Denver?

RALPH GIBSON:  —once in a while, we'll have shows of other people. It's—there's two phases to it, and so we're moving into it—and first, we're going to open it, first we're going to have the shows. I'm interested in functioning as a visual bridge between the Western visual linguistic and the Asian way of experiencing. This has to do with globalization and a lot of ideas that are simultaneously being examined in my little head. So when this opportunity came up, I realized that photography has always resisted any single canonical definition. And it's like the hydra, every time you shoot one, you get two, you know, and so. And now in the world of—in the digital world of compositing and things like that, photographic vision, how is photographic pure, so-called pure photography vision influencing compositing and vice versa? And how is the media, the binging we're doing, how is our visual language evolving?

And—because I broke from photojournalism into other territories, I've always been interested in this concept, in the nature of how and why and what we see relevant to what culture we were brought up in, and what culture we're—you see, you asked a question earlier, what do I think about looking at the early work? Well, one of the things is that I used to say that it took 25 years for a fashion photograph to become an art photograph, because, you see, that's what happens. You know, you get an get an old Avedon, or an old Penn, or an old Horst or something, you know, it looks different, and it's really not because fashion has changed, it's because society has changed. And based on what we know in the current society, we're looking at that society, previous societies, and we evaluate it as an art idea. So when I'm looking at my old work, it was made for one reason, and now it's functioning for another. Which reason is predicated on what Lévi-Strauss calls, you know, the social matrix, and how it continues to evolve. So I have a—to the extent it's possible, I have my thumb on the visual pulse of that, and I think a lot about it, and I observe it and attempt to define it.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Do you think about the—compare and contrast, the differences between, say, Korean, Japanese, Chinese photography, and Western photography, and does that impact one of the reasons that you were so interested in working with the South Koreans on this project?

RALPH GIBSON:  I used to think that a country—I used to think that Japan, because of its calligraphy, would have a natural compositional graphic to their work. And then I went to Japan, and I found out that the culture was so strong that it doesn't. They just wanted people to take a certain kind of picture; social orientation, two or three really good photographers like Moriyama, or people like that, you know. They're kind of a break with it. I don't think there is a distinctly Japanese look to photo—to their photography, I really don't. They're all over the place and I'm—I had several parties in my honor, and I would meet all the photographers and stuff like that, and—you know? There doesn't seem to be, in a globalized world now. You know, Japan's culture, which is basically kimonos and emperors and stuff like that, it's not very, very evident in the work that they're showing.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Same for Korea, do you think?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, Korea is different, South Korea, but Korea is different because the culture of Korea is that Japan was a—was Australia to—for the Koreans, it was their penal colony, right?

[00:05:03]

I mean, they're much more evolved, they were earlier, and so they're much less contracted than—they're less—they—they're not so squeezed into a cultural imprint as my experience of the Japanese. My experience of the Chinese, they're just on their own trip. They're the center of the world, and we're the ones who are—have the problems, you know, so.

I think I—when I first went to Europe in the early '70s, I spent a month in London, which was a great entry portal into the European culture. And I've noticed that South Korea is a perfect place to start your Asians—Asian travels, in my opinion.

TERRIE SULTAN:  That's interesting, because most people would probably say Japan.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, I guess so, but Japan, I mean, it's them and you. In Korea, you—you're not so isolated, you know, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  How involved were you in the early stages of this museum? Were you involved with the architects and the design, the writing of the program?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, what's—what we're doing is—

TERRIE SULTAN:  You say we, so this sounds like a collaboration to me.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you know, I have my input. We have a—they have a building that they were modifying and they're adapting to my museum, and then perhaps later it will—they'll build something.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So this is an adaptive reuse to an existing building. What was it before it was going to be a museum?

RALPH GIBSON:  I think it was an office building in Busan, yeah. But I'll show you the elevations, and it's pretty hip, it's nice to have.

TERRIE SULTAN:  How big is it?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I'm not exactly sure. It's four stories, and I imagine it's around four thousand, five thousand feet, something like that. I can always have a couple of hundred prints up, a major show, and then I'll have vitrines and video rooms and all the performance spaces and stuff, so. You see, I want to go there more often, and I will probably make two trips a year to South Korea. Our first—our next trip there is in September. We're going to go to Paris for two weeks. It's easier to go to Asia from France than it is from—you know, so we're—we've done that before, you know, so. It's going to open. Meanwhile, I'm getting all the files for this book. We're shipping the shows, we're shipping the artifacts, everything. I have everything I wanted when I was 40. I said that last week, right? Well, this is—it's a lot to do, but I'm lucky to have a to-do.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And then what's going to be next after you have your own museum in Korea, this big show in—about all of your work from France, a huge book that documents all this?

RALPH GIBSON:  I'm having a retro at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, in next spring. That's three hundred pieces. It's going to Munich and some other museum. Well, you know, Terrie, the thing is that this kind of momentum stimulates. I feel that I'm on the cusp of a—I've always wanted to put everything I knew into a photography, not—you know. And it's funneling down slightly, that's narrowing more and more into—

When I travel so much, I have a few ideas of things that I'm interested in, but where—it's back to the semiotic. I told you last week, I'm interested in photographing from the back of the retina. I'm interested in a qualitative aspect of an image that is not necessarily something we've previously seen but will probably be found in something very quotidian, very ordinary, you know? So it'll be more of the same, but it will probably be more intense when I find it. But I'm fully capable of it, and that's the—also get drawing closer, I did a thing with Laurie on Sunday, a musical thing, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Laurie—

RALPH GIBSON:  —Anderson.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —Anderson.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —and we did a little performance at her house, and it was very effective. It was very well received. It was for Audubon, it was a bird concert, so. I find that that I'm—music is finally fulfilling some of my pursuits—some of my musical pursuits are finally being fulfilled, just attitudes towards harmony and the content of tonality, and things like that.

[00:10:07]

TERRIE SULTAN:  What's the crossover between your interest in music and your interest in image making?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, they're both abstract, and maybe I said it last week, but in—I have this line which came to me, which is that, you see, reality and photography have a strong relationship, as have melody and music. So you could say that reality is to photography what melody is to music. I wrote this in my Self-Exposure book. So I bounced this line off Philip Glass one night, and I said, "You know, reality is—what do you think Philip, that reality is to photography what melody is to music?" He said, "Well, I could always do without melody," he said, "but I could never do without harmony." You see, the real root of the abstraction, the real reason music works is because of harmony. That's where the art happens. It's not just in the interval of a ba-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo, it's how—what you build around either side of those notes that—

So I—

TERRIE SULTAN:  How did you learn to read music?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you pick it up. I mean, the basic staff, I took six months of music lessons when I was 13 and—you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  When you were playing classical guitar?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah, and—but the thing about it, I have to write it down in order to remember the line and then when you write it down, you—there's a visual component to, you know, the intervals, the third, the fifth, whatever and stuff, so—

But you see, you could say, "I want you to do your thing with this fountain pen, Bic pen." Well, I could probably come up with something interesting visually pretty quick, based on my experience. But if you said, "Could you make me a musical phrase that would express what it feels like to hold this pen and watch the words come out?" It would take me longer.

TERRIE SULTAN:  But you think you could do it?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I could use that as a point of departure into a melody, yes. I don't know if I could do it, but I know I could try to do it. I know that I could give it a—and that's all you really want, you know, is to get started; make a mark, make another mark. You've heard guys say that, right? You know, so your husband says to make a mark, make another mark, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, that's how you start, and so. But it is widely noticed that people who are musicians have what they call a soft ear and are good with language, you see. So I mean, that's it. I've all—on a more conscious level, I've just said, well, my eyes are clearly my most evolved sense, so now let's work on the ears.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, I do think that taking music lessons when you're 13 years old, which was true for me as well, actually younger, it does open your mind to languages in particular.

RALPH GIBSON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. I should mention that I have a friend named Brandon Ross, who's a great musician, who, when I was in my maybe late fifties or early sixties or whatever, he came to my studio three or four days a week for intensive lessons on theory and harmony. So I mean I was tutored, and I did the same thing with French—and I had done the same thing with French. I do like to be tutored on a one-to-one over a protracted period. That's my best learning space.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Oh, you said you like to learn things, so—

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah. It's very—you know, I do my seminars and stuff, and I never say that I teach, I transfer information. That's my attitude towards it. Teaching implies that you know something, which subsequently suggests you're superior to the person who doesn't know that something, you know. I hate that aspect of it.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So tell me about these seminars. I mean, are they through a university, or how is that?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you know, I had done workshops all over the world since 1970, you know, and a group of photographers would come and you'd spend time together, and I would look at their work and we'd shoot pictures and we'd analyze them, and they would sort of rub elbows and see what a me does, and then then they, you know, could find out. So then I decided I was going to do it online, and the pandemic is—I like the travel that they've brought. I've done them in Australia, all over Europe—

TERRIE SULTAN:  So people—

RALPH GIBSON:  —Asia.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —organizations would bring you in?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah.

[00:15:00]

[END OF TRACK aaa_gibson22_2of2_sd_track05_m.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  To do your workshop?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yes, yes.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Like a museum, or a school?

RALPH GIBSON:  A museum, an organization. I did a bunch for Leica. I mean, I went to China to do one, the central academy, art academy invited me. I went to Australia, I've done them in Bangkok, I've just done them everywhere, so. And I came to the conclusion that the weekend, or the three or four-day intensive workshop, would transfer more information than somebody taking a photo course over three semesters, you know. I mean, really, I—I've—I hold firm to that conviction. So I'm sitting around, I said, "I need to sit on my chair and come up with an idea." So I sat in my chair, and I said, "I'm going to do workshops online with Zoom, and I'll advertise it on my website." And then I have a friend in Brazil who helped me with my Israel book, my assistant, and he does all the infrastructure, the booking, the bookkeeping, the everything. And about that time Leica called and said, "Would you like to do some workshops where it's online?" I said, "Well, I'm doing them," I said, "but you can announce them for a commission, a small—" you know? And so we did, we partnered, and they're very expensive, and—

TERRIE SULTAN:  How much is expensive for you?

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, I charge $4000 for four one-hour sessions over a one-month period, once a week.

TERRIE SULTAN:  That doesn't sound overly expensive.

RALPH GIBSON:  A thousand dollars an hour, but, you know, it's—

TERRIE SULTAN:  There's a lot of prep that goes into that.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, and you know, I have people who have taken it for the third time now, you know, I mean they—but they're all of a certain age and a certain degree of accomplishment, which makes them very interesting. But the big discovery is that if you do it, if you're teaching in a classroom lecturing, if you're doing a workshop in a space, these are public social events. You do it one-on-one on Zoom where somebody is sitting behind their desk in their playroom, or their den or their studio, or whatever the hell it is, they're much less guarded. You're—you immediately start at a much higher level of communication, and when you're talking about aesthetics, their art.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So these are all one-on-one, they're not—?

RALPH GIBSON:  One-on-one, yeah. I did a bookmaking one where I had 10 or 15, I forget, and then I did the group for the weekend, and then I did one-on-one during the week, and then the group for the next weekend, yeah. I like doing them. I have one or two going right now, and I have another initiative coming up, so. It gets me out of my own work, and it makes me think of other people, and that's one of the reasons I wrote Refractions. I had written a very small version of Refractions before, but many of these ideas, I started keeping notes while I was looking at their work and thinking about things, so, you know, so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Do you find that you're thinking more about your legacy these days?

RALPH GIBSON:  I don't care about it.

TERRIE SULTAN:  No?

RALPH GIBSON:  No. I—I'm just not hagiographic in that way. I have three archives in the world for—it sounds strange to say that, but I have a responsibility to the work. But I know people who want the work to live on after I die, you know? I can't process that thought. It doesn't—it's like you're speaking to me in some weird Mongolian dialect, I don't know what you mean, dead's dead.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah, but you're getting ready to be enshrined in a museum in South Korea, which is—

RALPH GIBSON:  Well—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —clearly—

RALPH GIBSON:  —I have other reasons for that, but it's not that I'm looking for eternal life.

[They laugh.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, but you're hoping that your work will have eternal life, right? I mean, that it will be meaningful—

RALPH GIBSON:  Well,—

TERRIE SULTAN:  —to generations to come.

RALPH GIBSON:  —there's a discrepancy in my altruism here. I—no, I'm just doing it because I can.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Okay.

RALPH GIBSON:  You see, the other thing is that I have sat holding hands with more than one grieving widow whose famous artist husband left them with a mountain of shit that they don't know what to do with. You know who and what I'm talking about. Well, my wife won't have that problem. I mean, the guy from the Center of Creative Photography was sitting in your chair Monday, "Yeah, we want all this, you know, and—" you know. I mean, I—I'm not going to make problems, I have a sense of—it's Duchampian, I talked about that last week, I have a sense of responsibility to all this stuff, but it's not about me. I'll be—I got—I'm the one who had the—all the goodies of being able to make the work, experience it, live off it, have a life, you know. Now, I'll just make sure it's cared for and that's—but unless you want to send me some information after I die, the—about all the good news, and people love it.

[00:05:00]

TERRIE SULTAN:  So you obviously don't believe in reincarnation. [Laughs.]

RALPH GIBSON:  As Jerry Lewis said, "I believe in Carnation Milk."

[They laugh.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, I mean, I know we're joking about this, but, I mean, I'm sitting in your studio, and I'm looking at box after box after box of work, and, you know, it's beautifully labeled, and it's clear that you may not be looking for eternal life for yourself, but you have a real care and sense of responsibility for the things that you've made.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, it's true because, you see, the art is always better than the artist, right? The photograph is better than the photographer.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, one hopes so.

RALPH GIBSON:  One hopes so. So that's true, but, you know, as I said before, Duchamp made it quite clear, a parent gives life to their child, you don't lock it in the closet. You don't make a work of art and then put it in the drawer and hide it for some reason, you know. Now, I'm just glad that I was able—I never thought that—you see, I always knew I was going to be a success in photography, I knew it from day one, but I thought I was going to be a fashion photographer or something like that. I didn't know that I was going to go this route at the time. I didn't know I was going to be so dissatisfied working professionally, and I had to invent my own way of working as a photographer.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, considering how young you were when you started, that doesn't seem to be outside the realm of possibility.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  You had ideas, you wanted to be a fashion photographer, then you were going to be a photojournalist, yeah, I think you have to do that kind of experimentation in your medium to find your own voice.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, sure, yeah, yeah. But you could argue that if—see, what—but to get in Magnum at 27 is already a kind of success, but it didn't feel like that, you know? And so I had to basically find out what was going to satisfy me, what was going to be reflected in the work that would give me enough sense to—and then—but, you know, every—anybody who's making a living off their work, he or she has a different—took a different way, variation on the theme to get there, you know. It's not like you get out of law school, and you go to a law firm and you work your way up through backstabbing, you know?

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  But I really—you know, I mean, I've had a—my career is a great thing. I mean, I've had all the recognition I deserve, no more, no less, you know, you—that's the other thing I tell all my buddies out here, I said, "Listen, man, you get a—you've all gotten exactly what you deserve." And they go—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Do you feel like you've reached your potential, the French notwithstanding?

RALPH GIBSON:  No, I—I've got a few—I mean, if you want my real candid—in terms of public recognition, we were talking about museums earlier, and I've got a list of museums, for example. I talked about this with some of my artist friends, it's very funny. Any number of museums have promised me one-man shows that never transpired, and as a museum director, you probably promised quite a few shows that just didn't quite, for one reason or another, get to happen, is that true or not?

TERRIE SULTAN:  No.

RALPH GIBSON:  It's not true?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Not for me.

RALPH GIBSON:  Not for you?

TERRIE SULTAN:  I have never made a promise to somebody that I haven't kept.

RALPH GIBSON:  That you couldn't? Well, I don't know if these were promises, I don't know if they put their hand on the Bible, but I have been said—I've been told that I was going to have shows. That defunct museum we discussed earlier was one such place, by a prominent leader, and—you know, it's not so many, it's maybe seven or eight, and so—

TERRIE SULTAN:  The defunct museum being the Corcoran Gallery of Art?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah. I remember that. Once Jane said, let's—no, it wasn't Jane, it was Philip—what's his name—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Philip Brookman.

RALPH GIBSON:  Brookman, yeah, yeah, yeah. But she said to me something once too. They—I—I'm not going to mention any more names because that's not diplomatic, but—

TERRIE SULTAN:  And this will be available to people forever now.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, I don't care, I don't even know—you're the one who said her name, not me.

TERRIE SULTAN:  But that's okay.

RALPH GIBSON:  Because I realize—see, now I understand the pragmatic of it, because I think at the time they say that, they want to do it, then things change.

[00:10:05]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, and also you have to recognize that if you don't have the power—oh, let's take Philip Brookman as a perfect example; a wonderful curator, but he was never in charge of his own life professionally, in the terms of the museum, because he always had a chief curator and a director above him.

RALPH GIBSON:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

TERRIE SULTAN:  I've been lucky in my career that I've worked in small—smaller museums, where I could be—

RALPH GIBSON:  You're the boss, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —the boss, and so if I decided that something was really important to me, I was able to do it.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, you know, that's a—that comes under the category of how museums are changing now in the world, which is another one of my pet themes, all the private museums. This is unprecedented.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, and you understand why people do that, because, you know, if you're Mitch Rales, and you want to show your work the way you want to show it, and you have the wherewithal to do it yourself, you do, because—

RALPH GIBSON:  Sure.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —then you don't have to worry about other trustees, or—I mean, you go all the way back to the Corcoran, and you'll see exactly what I mean. Mr. Corcoran had a real vision. He wanted his museum to be the National Gallery. Well, first of all, he was a Southern sympathizer, so he was on the wrong side of that political situation. He had to leave the country, the government in Washington took over his museum and turned it into an—a—

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh really?

TERRIE SULTAN:  —a war office, then they gave it back when the war was over. He came back, and instead of running it as a private museum, he put together a group of people to be his trustees. And then when he wanted to buy the Frederic Church Heart of the Andes, one of the world's greatest masterpieces of all time, his trustees—even though it was his money—wouldn't let him. So if you think about that, and you think, you know, you're Mitch Rales or any of these other people—I don't mean to pick on Mitch Rales but, you know, he's got such a wonderful space in—outside of Washington. He can do what he wants.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah. Well, that's—I was thinking, yes, and I mean I was thinking of the—since the art world went bananas on prices, that these twenty-, hundred-million-dollar paintings, museums can't buy those any longer, and you can give those to the Met or to MoMA with no guarantee they're ever going to put it on the wall, so you know, what's the point of that? So then you make your own museum. And Peter Brant's—you know, I'd rather have a show at The Brant Foundation I think, certainly the one in Second Street, than half the museums in New York. I mean it's a hipper space, I mean.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, look at Eli Broad in LA.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Are you in that collection?

RALPH GIBSON:  No. I'm not, not in Broad's collection I don't think, but not that I know of.

TERRIE SULTAN:  I don't think he collected much in photography.

RALPH GIBSON:  But I wasn't so taken by that museum as much as though, because it's right next to the opera house, and that kind of shoots it down architecturally for me.

[They laugh.]

RALPH GIBSON:  But what I was really going to say was that, the thought I was pursuing, was that—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Going back to having realized your potential.

RALPH GIBSON:  What happened was that—no, the idea was that I was going to say, which is interesting, is when I got the Legion of Honor, I stopped caring about anything else external. I stopped caring about museum shows, promise fulfilled, unfulfilled. I thought the external world had—I mean, you've probably never met a successful artist who wasn't still hustling for something. Well, you—I'm the first, because once I got that, I realized that for—in terms of my construct, my psychic construction, that's all I—that's what I wanted.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Why is that so important to you?

RALPH GIBSON:  It just is, and I—I'm not prepared to reveal that much to the Smithsonian, but I've got my reasons, and when I put that on, I got off the hook, let me tell you. I—

TERRIE SULTAN:  That was a real aspiration for you.

RALPH GIBSON:  It had been. I'll tell you a funny story. When I was 21, I was assistant to a guy, a photographer in San Francisco, and we had a commission to do a portrait of Darius Milhaud, you know, the composer, who was teaching at Mills. And he was in a wheelchair, and he has a beautiful French suit, and he had this little red ribbon. And I took his picture and I—look at that little red thing in this, I said, "I like that, what is that?" That's a—

[00:15:00]

[END OF TRACK aaa_gibson22_2of2_sd_track06_m.]

RALPH GIBSON:  [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Interesting.

RALPH GIBSON:  I—and I only have one regret, that I was decorated with [Order of] Arts and Letters, I have Commandeur of that, but my only regret is that I didn't get it in time for Leo, for Castelli to know, because he and I had a real—he was very thrilled when he got his. But you see, the thing is that there is a period where, when you're a struggling artist craving recognition, if you're excluded from a book or a group show or something, it used to make me mad, and I'd work harder. And then when I did get recognized, it released tremendous energy, and so I worked harder and went further, faster, you see. This is a principle I've seen in the rock stars, 50,000 people screaming, well, the guy writes a better song the next day, you know what I mean?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

RALPH GIBSON:  So—I always—I formulated a thing, I wanted enough recognition to be able to do my work, unimpeded, which is precisely what I got, you know. Now, I know a lot of—I know—I have a lot of friends who think that their work is probably more important even than it is, you know. I see myself as—I might have said this last week, as a grain of sand in the Sahara of culture. I'm just one of many, you know, it's—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Right, but you have a Legion d'honneur.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, yeah, but that's between me and it, you see, that's the funny thing about it. I'm still just a grain of sand with or without it, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

RALPH GIBSON:  It's really—it's very interesting that, and—I mean, you see, there's two reasons you do the work. Some people do it to show the world what they've done, and I'm not that way. I do it because I need the thrill, I need the sense of self. Boy, oh, boy, and with or without recognition, I get that when I get it, when I do, I do, with or without. So I've always stated that if I hadn't have had enough money, I would've never even answered the phone. That's true, right. Until I came up with the Duchamp idea, reading that Pierre Cabanne book Dialogues with Duchamp, until I read that Duchamp book, I didn't particularly care about it, because I grew up in Hollywood and I knew what stardom was, and I knew they were all phonies, and you know, I just didn't—

But I found—and probably in the last 15 or 20 years, I'm starting to really believe that what I said was true, in that I really didn't care what anybody thought about my work as long as I was getting off on it. Because nobody's going to spend as much time looking at it as I am. And when I do my seminars, I say, "Listen, nobody's more—is more prepared to say if this is good or bad than the person who made it. He or she is the one who knows what, you know, you are attempting to do." So then it subsequently follows that, well, how do you learn how to evaluate your work, and that I can help people with a lot.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, that's probably one of the most important things, is that you as the artist need to be able to edit your own work.

RALPH GIBSON:  Oh yeah, oh, it's true. I have said many times, I am a fascistic editor. Now as I've gotten older, I've gotten a little less—a little more indulgent, but I didn't bring out that book The Somnambulist till I knew what it was, you know? And a lot of people tend to go off too soon, you know, in the early stages of thrill-of-the-paint's-not-dry-yet, wow, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  You let things stew.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah. But the creative process is really—so what is the relationship between the creative process of the artist and the results, the content of the work, you know? What is it? And this has changed a lot since money, serious money entered into the discussion, the equation. And so, basically, a work that sells for 20 million is a better work than one that sells for 18 [million], isn't it? [Laughs.]

[00:05:07]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yes, you're laughing—

RALPH GIBSON:  That's really where we are now, and so like, you know, I don't particularly want to go into that world, you know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Right, it's too much about commerce.

RALPH GIBSON:  I mean, what do you do with—what's your take on KAWS? Do you like his work? Of course not, there's nothing there. You know too much about art to be able look at something like that, right? Sure, I know. It's just that—but that's—so, on the other hand, I have a friend, Nessia Leonzini, Nessia Pope, who said—when I tell her these ideas, she said—you know, she goes to see maybe four shows a week, and she's—every museum, she knows every artist for the last 50 years. She said, "I've been in a lot of studios," and she said, "He's just—he's probably just about as serious as—over his work, as you are about yours." She says—

TERRIE SULTAN:  Oh sure, that's true.

RALPH GIBSON:  You know, which is kind of interesting, but—

TERRIE SULTAN:  I'm sure that's true.

RALPH GIBSON:  You know? I mean, what gets more interesting is where you have Donald Judd writing one of his pieces where he—where he hates Twombly, you know? That's a—maybe he had a mini-stroke in his sleep or something the night before he wrote that. [Laughs.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  You know, some of this is generational, it just has to be—you know?

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  As much as we might not care to admit it.

RALPH GIBSON:  No, I—I'm more—I would love to have that be the reason.

TERRIE SULTAN:  I think it is.

RALPH GIBSON:  I think it has more to do with the instant accessibility, and the lack of required perception.

TERRIE SULTAN:  But that's also generational.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  We grew up in a different world, where things weren't instantaneous—

RALPH GIBSON:  That's true, yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —you know, so it—everything was a slow burn. Now, that doesn't exist anymore.

RALPH GIBSON:  Well, there is a principle that—the more people, in any given situation, the faster it's moving. [Laughs.] You know?

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah.

RALPH GIBSON:  That's all there is to it. Any kind of situation, the more people you put in, the velocity increases, so yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  And it's our job, as well as your job as an artist, to slow people down.

RALPH GIBSON:  I guess so. I—I'm more interested in—you know, towards the end of his life, Lou Reed—I was friends with Lou, and we did that film together, and he said, "Do you ever think about just giving up all—giving it all up and going to the mountain?" And this, this is about three years before he died, I said, "What, are you crazy? No, I'm in the thick of it, I love it." But now I see what he meant, you see. Because, effectively, by moving out here, I have gone to the mountain, and the pandemic sent everybody to the mountain, and I liked it. I got a tremendous amount done. I did two or three books, I opened up my workshop, and got my museum going. The pandemic was really hugely productive in my case, you know, because it eliminated a lot of the externals. I had never really thought that going out every night, dinner party with friends and lunches and stuff like that, but take those away, and you do produce more.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, you have a lot more time.

RALPH GIBSON:  To fill.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah. Well, no, it's interesting. I do think that, as difficult as the pandemic was globally, and let's not, you know, dismiss the struggles that people went through. For many, many artists, having those distractions eliminated from their daily life was a plus.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah. You see, I know it was for me, plus the fact that I'm in another—I'm in my octogenarian phase of life, which means—one of the things, for sure, I don't have as much energy in—but if I put in a good day in the studio, by six o'clock at night, I want to nap. I don't really feel like going out to another event, an opening, a theater, a—you know? If I am going to do that, I'll take a nap, I'll knock off at four, and—on and on and on, so. Those things, people my age who go out are retired.

TERRIE SULTAN:  [Laughs.] You're never going to retire.

RALPH GIBSON:  Most guys my age are either retired or dead, or both.

[They laugh.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Well, I would say you have many, many good years ahead of you—

RALPH GIBSON:  I hope so.

TERRIE SULTAN:  —productively, for sure.

RALPH GIBSON:  —I really hope so. I'm glad we had trouble finding that electrical outlet because I discovered a couple boxes of books that I was—thought I was running out.

TERRIE SULTAN:  Yeah, they're there.

RALPH GIBSON:  Yeah. Yeah.

TERRIE SULTAN:  So, Ralph, any concluding words for this interview? I think that you have been extraordinarily open and generous about sharing your thoughts on your creative process and your life so far.

RALPH GIBSON:  I know. Yes, the years of struggle are over. Now begin the years of struggle.

[They laugh.]

TERRIE SULTAN:  Thank you.

RALPH GIBSON:  Pleasure, thank you, Terrie.

[00:10:23]

[END OF TRACK aaa_gibson22_2of2_sd_track07_m.]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]