Photography is a bit like electricity: We know how to use it, but we don’t really know what it is. My yearning is to get deeper and deeper within the medium to ideal picture that’s “A Photograph,” not an example of what photography can do or how it’s applied but what “A Photograph” would be. Don’t tell me what it looks like, or how it’s done. What is it? And I know in answering that question successfully one would not only define the medium but would make a photograph unlike any we’ve previously.

You see, if you’re making a painting it’s additive – you keep adding on brush strokes until you finished. When I do photography I’m more like the guy who’s chipping away – subtracting at the sculpture, chipping away at the stone block. I take as much out of the picture as I can. So I get into it just what I really want. The graphic quality in a photograph is only as good as the feeling it produces.

Samuel Goldburn really put it very succinctly when he said: “If you have a message send a telegram.” Well, I don’t have a message to another person in my photographs whatsoever – I’m simply working with the medium.

What people like to refer to as “The Message” is all about my personal dialogue, introspection, self-communication. Now if you must call that a message, go right ahead, but it’s not a message in the normal context of the word. A message is from one person to another.

Ralph Gibson
A Few of the Legend. A Series by Peter Adams
LensWork No.43