Infanta
The female nude has long been an important subject for photographer Gibson, but in earlier books, his nudes appeared as elements in sequences of all kinds of images. WithInfanta, Gibson abandons the sequencing, presenting instead a collection of big, rather simplified black-and-white images. Like Lee Friedlander in hisNudes(1991), in middle age Gibson expresses an intense fascination with the bodies of young women. Whereas Friedlander used the camera to awkwardly describe specific details, Gibson uses his to idealize beautiful body fragments. Gibson's high-contrast, grainy printing style and abstract compositions have hardly changed in two decades. Alexandra Anderson-Spivy's accompanying essay perceptively responds to Gibson's work, but Mary Gaitskill's vulgar afterword (the memoir of a stripper) seems jarringly inappropriate to the idealism of the photographs.Gretchen Garner