I really love photobooks, and I really love photographers who love photobooks. These photographers often tend to prefer the photobook as the primary means of presenting their work to the world, in fact, over hanging their work on a wall. To my mind, seeing photographs printed in a sequence in a photobook kind of changes their meaning; it makes them part of a narrative. It's kind of like reading a super compelling, hypnotic story that doesn't have any words.
Ralph Gibson's photographs, and the photobooks that most of them were originally first printed in, are distinctive because each one of them, on its own, already possesses so much narrative. They've often been called mysterious, and for good reason. Some of his pictures actually look like stills from a Hitchcock film. There's a lot of mystery even to his still lives, and many of his portraits make you feel like you're looking at something a little bit secret, like he's giving you a supremely zesty slice of a story, but then concealing the rest of it. It's kind of a tantalizing effect. Never in my life have I been slightly turned on by a black and white photograph of a door handle and keyhole. Gibson was the master of the cropped image, and maybe this sort of accounts for my bizarre reaction to that photograph. We rarely see the whole face of the person he was shooting—nor the whole body, the whole bicycle, the whole door, the whole chair, the whole jar of carrots (yes, he made a cropped photograph of a jar of carrots, and its fucking brilliant). He gives us only a taste. And for me personally, it creates the effect of wanting so much more.
-Eugenie Dalland