Two Pictures

Ralph Gibson, Shiela in Car, 1969 Copyright Ralph Gibson

Ralph Gibson published The Somnambulist, from which this picture comes, in 1970. He had spent the preceding couple of years living in the Chelsea and hanging out at Max's Kansas City, and it showed. As he has said of those years: "The camera was leading me to other dimensions, to expressions of entirely new feelings. The images took on a decidedly surrealistic overtone. I didn't understand what it all meant, but I continued to follow this tone. Eventually it occurred to me that I had been photographing a dream state."


Dorothea Lange, Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley Town, 1936.

Dorothea Lange, for whom Gibson would later work as an assistant, took this picture for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. I've seen no statement of her intention in making it, but, knowing just a little about her, it's easy to imagine her standing in the dust by the side of the road as the cortege passed, recording what it offered.

Two women. Two black cars. Two pictures.

How is it that we know, when we look at the first of them, that if what we are seeing is real, it is real only in the way a dream might be, while, when we look at the second, we know it is as real as death and regret and everything else in it?

No qualitative distinction is intended; I like them both. But it is hard to imagine two more different pictures, even of different things. Two more different pictures of the same thing would be inconceivable.