La Trilogie, Ralph Gibson
Signed copy

Ralph Gibson's first three photobooks are collectively known as The Black Trilogy - and have been credited with re-imagining the modern photobook. Now, for the first time, the whole trilogy is available in one book.

In 1973 Ralph Gibson published his first photobook, The Somnambulist; he followed up with Déjà Vu in 1973, and Days at Sea in 1974. Together the books form a trilogy which has been credited with re-imagining the modern photobook; all three were published by Lustrum Press, an organisation formed by Gibson to retain creative control of his work.

Born in 1939 in LA, at the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Gibson was inspired by the cinema – both the American movies he grew up with, and the avant-garde films made by later European auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. Trained in photography while in the American Navy, from 1956-1959, Gibson went on to work for Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, and moved to New York in 1966.

Gilles Mora, curator of the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, which held the Trilogy exhibition at the end of 2017, describes Gibson as one of “the last heroes of photography”, and credits him with having a lasting influence on photographers to this day. A number of Gibson’s images have also become known beyond the photography world, however – particularly Hand Through a Doorway, from The Somnambulist, which was used on the inner sleeve of Joy Division’s 1979 album Unknown Pleasures.

Editions Hazan
Text in French by Gilles Mora
Date: 18/10/2017
Format: 222 x 313 mm
200 pages
Code EAN: 9782754110310
Signed copy