Silhouette, Paris 1982, from the portfolio Artifacts

In Artifacts, Gibson explores photography as a technical intervention that produces images that appear both natural and manufactured. In Silhouette, Paris, the high contrast between the sitter and the window—the only source of light in the image—produces a high-contrast image reminiscent of the eighteenth-century practice of drawing silhouettes. In this sense, the photograph belongs to a lineage of images with a precedent in Pliny’s story of the Corinthian Maid who traces her lover’s shadow. The backlighting technique flattens any personal trace of the human figure, while the background presents a more voluminous scene on the window with the curtains and the iron baluster.

(Rodrigo Gusman Serrano, PhD student, “Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder,” exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Verity J. Platt, presented at the Johnson Museum January 21–June 11, 2023)

Additional materials by Ralph Gibson are held in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Archives 8057.