Great Jones Street
Photographer
Author
Book Genre
Photograph Title
Untitled (from the book Déjà Vu) ca. 1968
Notes
Designer Michael Ian Kaye has cut up, partially duplicated and reassembled Ralph Gibson's mysterious image (the 'original' can be found in the book Déjà Vu, technically Gibson's third book of photographs, but the second from his seminal Black Trilogy) for the cover of Don DeLillo's classic Great Jones Street.
Gibson has many book covers to his credit, in part because his imagery, while rooted in the real world, is enigmatic, rigorously composed and visually reductive enough to serve as template for a plethora of meaning, mostly assigned by the viewer.
In Great Jones Street, the master wordsmith Don Dellilo riffs on rock 'n roll culture of the 1960s, as told through the voice of Bucky Wunderlich, a jaded and disillusioned rock star who has holed up in an empty apartment on the New York City street of the book's title.
The book's plot references the notion of language on any number of occasions, culminating with the forced injection of Wunderlich with a drug that renders him incapable of coherent speech; he can only make sounds. Seen within this context, Gibson's photo compels the viewer/reader to consider the nature of letters, words, sentences, etc, in the construction of meaning. Added to this is designer Kaye's 'resectioning' of the photo, calling to mind the automatic writing and Exquisite Corpse techniques of André Breton and the Surrealists.
In 1975, I attended a slide lecture by Ralph Gibson. He was articulate, perhaps a little glib, and had something to say about many of the images he projected on the screen. When he came to this photo, he said that he made a point of taking pictures of seemingly random, serindipitous groupings of text, thinking that when he eventually viewed them all together, they would somehow spell out the meaning of his life. Tongue in cheek, for sure, but it made me realize that with some artists, it is in the spaces between one work and another that meaning may be found.
To view a very low-rez (but the only one I could find on the web) version of Gibson's original image, click here.
Gibson has many book covers to his credit, in part because his imagery, while rooted in the real world, is enigmatic, rigorously composed and visually reductive enough to serve as template for a plethora of meaning, mostly assigned by the viewer.
In Great Jones Street, the master wordsmith Don Dellilo riffs on rock 'n roll culture of the 1960s, as told through the voice of Bucky Wunderlich, a jaded and disillusioned rock star who has holed up in an empty apartment on the New York City street of the book's title.
The book's plot references the notion of language on any number of occasions, culminating with the forced injection of Wunderlich with a drug that renders him incapable of coherent speech; he can only make sounds. Seen within this context, Gibson's photo compels the viewer/reader to consider the nature of letters, words, sentences, etc, in the construction of meaning. Added to this is designer Kaye's 'resectioning' of the photo, calling to mind the automatic writing and Exquisite Corpse techniques of André Breton and the Surrealists.
In 1975, I attended a slide lecture by Ralph Gibson. He was articulate, perhaps a little glib, and had something to say about many of the images he projected on the screen. When he came to this photo, he said that he made a point of taking pictures of seemingly random, serindipitous groupings of text, thinking that when he eventually viewed them all together, they would somehow spell out the meaning of his life. Tongue in cheek, for sure, but it made me realize that with some artists, it is in the spaces between one work and another that meaning may be found.
To view a very low-rez (but the only one I could find on the web) version of Gibson's original image, click here.
Photo Genre
Designer
Collection
Citation
“Great Jones Street,” Covering Photography, accessed November 21, 2024, https://coveringphotography.bc.edu/items/show/6818.