Highlights - RALPH GIBSON - Award-winning Photographer - Leica Hall of Fame Inductee

Highlights - RALPH GIBSON - Award-winning Photographer - Leica Hall of Fame Inductee

Award-winning Photographer
Leica Hall of Fame Inductee · Recipient of the French Legion of Honor

I wouldn't be able to effectively delineate where my life ends and photography begins. They're one and the same. If my eyes are open, I'm seeing. If I'm seeing, I'm essentially in that valence within which, or from within which come the images. In that book, Self Exposure, one of the things I did realize as I was writing it: all autobiographies are chronological and anecdotal. That's the way they unfold. And I realized that there were certain decisions I had made along the way that were crucial. And there was really only a handful of them. But I was very fortunate because I had that initial desire to be a photographer. I don't even know if it was a desire. I think it was something much further beyond that. I would have to say it was more of a...I didn't really choose photography, it sort of chose me, you know. I mean, nolo contendere. I just did what I knew I had to do. There was a sense of devoir, you know, you just do it. Claude Lévi-Strauss the great social anthropologist has made this sort of thing clear: Society changes and with it the context through which we observe something has changed as well. And so I like the role of art in society and my relationship to my society and to art in my society. Now I'm interested in this phase of my life and how does the mind influence the mind? 

RALPH GIBSON - Award-winning Photographer - Leica Hall of Fame Inductee

RALPH GIBSON - Award-winning Photographer - Leica Hall of Fame Inductee

Award-winning Photographer
Leica Hall of Fame Inductee · Recipient of the French Legion of Honor

I wouldn't be able to effectively delineate where my life ends and photography begins. They're one and the same. If my eyes are open, I'm seeing. If I'm seeing, I'm essentially in that valence within which, or from within which come the images. In that book, Self Exposure, one of the things I did realize as I was writing it: all autobiographies are chronological and anecdotal. That's the way they unfold. And I realized that there were certain decisions I had made along the way that were crucial. And there was really only a handful of them. But I was very fortunate because I had that initial desire to be a photographer. I don't even know if it was a desire. I think it was something much further beyond that. I would have to say it was more of a...I didn't really choose photography, it sort of chose me, you know. I mean, nolo contendere. I just did what I knew I had to do. There was a sense of devoir, you know, you just do it. Claude Lévi-Strauss the great social anthropologist has made this sort of thing clear: Society changes and with it the context through which we observe something has changed as well. And so I like the role of art in society and my relationship to my society and to art in my society. Now I'm interested in this phase of my life and how does the mind influence the mind? 

(Highlights) GEORGE MANGINIS

(Highlights) GEORGE MANGINIS

Academic Director of the Benaki Museum

If we are to use a few words to characterise the Benaki, we can say it is the only museum in the world that presents Greek culture from the history to the 21st century, and culture seen holistically, so not just fine art, but also applied arts and historical documents, literature, photography, and architecture. It’s a very inclusive perception of art, but also in relation to global art and world cultures.

GEORGE MANGINIS

GEORGE MANGINIS

Academic Director of the Benaki Museum

If we are to use a few words to characterise the Benaki, we can say it is the only museum in the world that presents Greek culture from the history to the 21st century, and culture seen holistically, so not just fine art, but also applied arts and historical documents, literature, photography, and architecture. It’s a very inclusive perception of art, but also in relation to global art and world cultures.

(Highlights) SEBASTIEN GOKALP

(Highlights) SEBASTIEN GOKALP

Sébastien Gokalp · Director of France’s National Museum of Immigration
Curator of Exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris & Louis Vuitton Foundation

We have a motto that says that ‘we want to change the gaze on immigration or to open the eyes on immigration’. We’re not here to make action in society, but we want people who come here to have elements of reflection, perception about the question of immigration. To change a mind, because immigration is about the stories of people who come from another country–they are someone else, basically–by assisting them we want to show how someone else can be great for us and not a stranger, foreigner, nor an enemy, but a friend. Someone who will bring us many things about culture, about work, about a way of meaning, of thinking. We have a historical point of view. We want to show that from the French Revolution until now, so two centuries of stories.

SEBASTIEN GOKALP

SEBASTIEN GOKALP

Sébastien Gokalp · Director of France’s National Museum of Immigration
Curator of Exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris & Louis Vuitton Foundation

We have a motto that says that ‘we want to change the gaze on immigration or to open the eyes on immigration’. We’re not here to make action in society, but we want people who come here to have elements of reflection, perception about the question of immigration. To change a mind, because immigration is about the stories of people who come from another country–they are someone else, basically–by assisting them we want to show how someone else can be great for us and not a stranger, foreigner, nor an enemy, but a friend. Someone who will bring us many things about culture, about work, about a way of meaning, of thinking. We have a historical point of view. We want to show that from the French Revolution until now, so two centuries of stories.

JACQUES VILLEGLÉ · English Interview Highlights

JACQUES VILLEGLÉ · English Interview Highlights

Artist & Grandfather of French Street Art

There was the war from ‘40 to ‘45 under the Fascists, so I didn’t have art training at that time. The painter Picasso, we knew the name, the artist who painted an eye in the place of a navel, that’s all I knew at the age of seventeen. I found a book published in 1926, the year of my birth, speaking of the painters Braque, Picasso and Miró. And then all the figurative painters at that time, Van Dongen…so it was a new style that I encountered there.

Full Interview · French · JACQUES VILLEGLÉ

Full Interview · French · JACQUES VILLEGLÉ

Artist & Grandfather of French Street Art

There was the war from ‘40 to ‘45 under the Fascists, so I didn’t have art training at that time. The painter Picasso, we knew the name, the artist who painted an eye in the place of a navel, that’s all I knew at the age of seventeen. I found a book published in 1926, the year of my birth, speaking of the painters Braque, Picasso and Miró. And then all the figurative painters at that time, Van Dongen…so it was a new style that I encountered there.