THE HOURGLASS

In a Ralph Gibson photo, the erotic is never obvious. Palpable, yes. Electric, certainly. But rather than dictate what the eye should see, Gibson prefers to leave room for the imagination to roam. “There’s very little or no event in my photos. I’m not waiting for the bullet to be fired or the ax to drop,” he says of his work, much of which focuses on the nude. “What’s going on is whatever you decide is going on. I’m not about detail. I’m interested in big areas in which nothing much is happening except tension.”

To wit, Gibson’s images have a mysterious, fragmentary quality that prompts more questions than it answers, an effect he heightens by shooting mainly in black and white. “Reality exists in three dimensions, a hundred percent scale and in color,” he explains. “Now you take a picture in black and white and reduce it to two dimensions and onto a page. You’re three steps abstracted from reality. You’ve got yourself a lot of drama.”

For Whisper, Gibson produced a scorchingly suggestive photograph that nevertheless reveals absolutely nothing: A fully clothed man holds the leg of what we assume is a nude woman. Originally shot for Playboy, it’s safe to assume it will have the same effect on viewers as the very first issue of that magazine, with Marilyn Monroe as its centerfold, had on a teenage Gibson. “I was galvanized,” he remembers. “Just galvanized.”