Nude

A career-spanning survey of Ralph Gibson's nude photography, collecting his best-known images of the female form alongside more recent work.

Gibson's nudes work through tight cropping, hard-edged black-and-white contrast, and a fragmentary framing of the body that turns skin, shadow, and gesture into near-abstraction. The approach is in dialogue with the history of the nude in painting and sculpture as much as with photography's own erotic tradition. TASCHEN's volume gathers this body of work across five decades into a single 352-page hardcover, printed in tritone. It includes a newly commissioned interview between Gibson and painter Eric Fischl on the nude as a subject each has returned to throughout his career. The book was first issued in a limited collector's edition in 2009 before this expanded, trade edition followed.

Gibson (b. 1939) apprenticed with Dorothea Lange and worked as an assistant to Robert Frank. In 1970 he published The Somnambulist, a book that helped define the modern photobook as an authored, sequenced object rather than a portfolio. His prolific output since, including the geometric, high-contrast black-and-white work collected in One Picture Book and, more recently, Unfiltered, has made him one of the most widely exhibited American photographers of his generation. Nude sits alongside that body of work as his sustained study of a single subject.