1982 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
1987 International Center of Photography, New York
1988 Bibliothe`que nationale de France, Paris
1991 Vision Gallery, San Francisco
1996 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1999 Maison Europee ́nne de la Photographie, Paris
2001 Center for Creative Photography, University of Ari-
zona, Tucson
Selected Group Exhibitions
1978 Mirrors and Windows, Museum of Modern Art, New
York, New York
1980 Old and Modern Masters of Photography, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London
1987 Photography and Art 1946–1986, Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
1993 Photographers Who Created a New Age, Tokyo Metro-
politan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan
1997 Masterworks from the San Francisco Museum of Mod-
ern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San
Francisco
Selected Works (Books)
The Strip, 1967
Somnambulist, 1970
Deja-vu, 1971
Days at Sea, 1974
L’Histoire De France, 1991
The Spirit of Burgundy, 1994
Ex Libris, 2001Further Reading
Baldwin, Roger and Ralph Gibson.Contemporary Photo-
graphers, C. Naylor, ed. Chicago: St. James, 1988.
Gibson, Ralph. ‘‘On Content.’’Creative CameraDecember,
1972.
Deschin, Jacob. ‘‘Viewpoint.’’Popular PhotographyJuly, 1972.
Lewis, Eleanor, ed.Darkroom. New York: Lustrum Press,
Inc., 1977.
Heredia, Paula, Director.Ralph Gibson: Photographer/Book
Artist. 2002 (video).N. TIM GIDAL
German
Photojournalist Tim Gidal entered the profession at
a watershed moment in the history of the medium.
Born Ignaz Nachum Gidalewitsch in Munich in
1909, twenty-year-old Gidal published his first
photo essay the same year the Deutsche Werkbund
launched its influential traveling exhibition of mod-
ern photographyFilm und Fotoin 1929. The largest
exhibition devoted solely to photography to date,
‘‘FiFo’’ (as it became known), celebrated the med-
ium’s stylistic diversity and international import at
the end of the 1920s. Though Gidal entered the
profession too late to be included in this ground-
breaking show, he quickly earned a reputation as
one of the innovators of the new ‘‘objective’’ style of
photojournalism it promoted. The eyewitness ob-
jectivity, visual acuity, and passion for social justice
for which Gidal became known were evident, even
in his earliest photographic essay titledGreetings,
Comrades!, published in theMu ̈nchner Illustrierte
Pressein June, 1929.
By the end of World War I, photography’s per-
ceived objectivity had largely displaced the subjec-
tivity and emotional angst of Germany’s wartime
journalism and Expressionist painting. In the midst
of the nation’s mounting obsession withSachlich-
keit, or objectivity, photojournalists like Gidal
offered the nearly five million purchasers of Ger-
man-illustrated magazines compelling first-hand
accounts of Europe’s ‘‘golden twenties’’ and dee-
pening political, social, and cultural strife.
Gidal’s own life was deeply affected by the Na-
tional Socialists’ ascent to power in the early thir-
ties. The fourth of five children born to liberal
Orthodox Jewish Russian and Lithuanian immi-
grants, Gidal developed a deep appreciation for
his Jewish and Zionist identity.As a young man,
he studied history, art history, and economics at
the Universities of Berlin and Munich, but he stu-
died photography only informally with his photo-
journalist brother Georg, before Georg’s untimely
death in 1931. Gidal’s early professional success
placed him at the forefront of a growing league of
freelance photographers working for theDephot
photo agency in the late 1920s, including Kurt
Hulton, Felix Mann, Erich Salomon, and Umbo,
among others. One of his most influential suppor-GIDAL, N. TIM