Customer Reviews

Infanta

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This is a beautiful and intriguing collection of black and white photographs. The subjects are all female (if you count one baby, of indeterminate gender), and are frequently nude. If you are open minded, I think you will find many (perhaps all) of these pictures erotic -- whatever your sexual orientation. However, this is art, not mediocre porn.

The images are generally fragments of women's bodies: a breast, a foot, a chin, a face, or just an eye. This makes it sound as if the women are objectified, but the photos always seem to invite us to revel in the beauty of the form. I, at least, feel that the pictures produce a sort of tender admiration (an "erotic" gaze, in the proper Greek sense of the term).

I disagreed with the reviewer who found Mary Gaitskill's Afterword "vulgar." (But then, Gaitskill tends to polarize readers.) Her brief essay explores her own feelings and experiences with how she and we view the naked female form, including its beauties, power, and vulnerabilities.

I found this a moving book; perhaps you will too.

For decades Ralph Gibson has worked in available light, using his hand held Leica rangefinder camera to produce work which transcends traditional fine art documentary photography, creating abstract, occasionally surrealistic images. Here in "Infanta", Gibson continues with his ongoing fascination with the female nude, but by depicting portions of the body; an eye, a breast, the torso, and so forth. What he has wrought are beautiful images which are a visual celebration of the female body. And these are stylized images rendered via the use of relatively coarse grain, high speed black and white film. Admittedly Gibson doesn't cover new ground artistically here, but instead builds on an already impressive body of work.

A handsome volume from Takarajima Books: black cloth over hardback boards with a sewn binding. Released with dustjacket.

119 pp. 2.5 pounds. Almost all b&w photography, one image per page.