A Quote by Ralph Gibson

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality. — © Ralph Gibson
I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.
Among those born into chaos, some will imagine an order and become scientists; a few will recognize the chaos and become abstract artists; most others will turn to faith for understanding; and the rest will become lost souls.
In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies - that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.
There's a reductiveness to photography, of course - in the framing of reality and the exclusion of chunks of it (the rest of the world, in fact). It's almost as if the act of photography bears some relationship to how we consciously manage the uncontrollable set of possibilities that exist in life.
Mathematicians are beginning to view order and chaos as two distinct manifestations of an underlying determinism. And neither state exists in isolation. The typical system can exist in a variety of states, some ordered, some chaotic. Instead of two opposed polarities, there is a continuous spectrum. As harmony and discord combine in musical beauty, so order and chaos combine in mathematical [and physical] beauty.
The moment you come to trust chaos, you see God clearly. Chaos is divine order, versus human order. Change is divine order, versus human order. When the chaos becomes safety to you, then you know you're seeing God clearly.
This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. … In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it’s an idealized order I’m imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.
You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order - order out of chaos. But we will.
In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.
The human mind and the entire life process is chaotic. Chaos is not something that lacks order; chaos has varieties of order within it.
Chaos and Order are not enemies, only opposites. Chaos and Order combined equal balance.
My favorite type of photography - apart from fashion photography - is journalism, which in a way documents something that exists in a very precise moment, that didnt exist in a moment before and will not exist ever again. This has influenced my work a lot - I usually try to make my images look like they just exist, like no effort was put into it.
Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair.
Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.
It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.
Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.
Take chaotic mathematics, for instance. The universe is chaos. But chaos is whimping out. There is no chaos. There are just different levels of order in the universe.
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