Ron Geibert 1992

Ron Geibert: Away From Home 

Isn’t every tourist a photographer?  The purpose of travel, it sometimes seems, is to create pictorial evidence of having traveled.  Taking pictures is often a substitute for seeing; little rectangles of colored plastic displace the experiences they ostensibly record.  Yet throughout photography’s history, we find evidence that travel may actually sharpen a good photographer’s perceptions and that some of the finest pictures are made away from home.

Nineteenth-century British photographer Francis Frith made his reputation with definitive views of Egypt.  His albumen prints show the ancient pyramids as crisply stated contemporary facts.  Their sense of reality (the eroded facades, the barren land) is vastly more impressive than any fanciful, painted reconstruction of perfect geometry gleaming beside a fictitious oasis.  They exemplify the “I was there” authority that is the characteristic strength of the best documentary photography.  Another convention of the photographer abroad is the acutely critical outsider who pierces directly to the heart of a place in ways a native observer would not likely imagine.  The Americans, a landmark book created by Swiss-born Robert Frank, epitomizes this approach.  That work reveals a powerful and viscerally subjective vision of this country, a view so shocking and compelling that it remains potent forty years later.

Ron Geibert’s photographs of Germany stem from a purpose that is very different from both Frith’s and Frank’s.  He does not pretend to offer detached, topographic observations of German monuments; nor does he attempt to penetrate and scrutinize a complex national psyche.  Instead he offers a refreshing and engaging demonstration of discreet and graceful photography.  In fact, these do not seem to be “foreign” pictures at all.  One is more impressed by their casual familiarity than by the occasional clues that make it clear they were not made in a prosperous corner of America. Though a foreigner to Germany in the standard sense of the word, Geibert is rooted in that country’s culture.  He is the product of a Lutheran, Nebraskan upbringing that was closer in many ways to the views and values of a comfortable German town than to those one might encounter in much of the United States.

A strenuous effort at deconstruction might possibly uncover in these pictures some evidence that they were made in a society that was absorbing immense political change.  To know that such quiet, simple, everydayness can exist in the midst of such transition may be reassuring or alarming, depending on one’s point of view.  But any attempt to read these images as interpretations of newspaper headlines would miss the point. Geibert’s photographs from Germany are not about ideology; they are about visual ideas, an experience of place, and the curious phenomenon of pictures.

Geibert’s first trip to Germany was made in 1983, when he was deeply involved with a study of competition.  He frequented bicycle races, beauty pageants, and baseball games, swim meets, parades, and county fairs, clamorous contests of all kinds.  His most familiar working milieu was a sizable crowd in a state of frenetic activity.  Geibert’s first round of pictures from Germany reflect his interest in group behavior.  Many of them focus on gatherings of people, yet in none of them do we encounter the giddy anxiety typical of American festivities. Instead there is a sense of calm, a quality of serenity and maturity that is remote from the strain and confusion that comprise so much of the atmosphere in Geibert’s American pictures from the same period.

The more recent pictures from Germany are marked by an even deeper sense of quiet and reserve.  These are oblique views, understated observations.  If, as John Szarkowski has proposed, photography is analogous to the act of pointing, these pictures are like almost imperceptible nods of the head towards subjects that would seem not to merit much attention.  Geibert’s photographs gently direct us to regard unprepossessing scenes and ephemeral moments, events at the periphery of our awareness.  In their softly spoken way, they enable us to discover the rewards of subtle, unassuming insight.

Ron Geibert photographs with the sensibility of a jazz musician.  He delights in taking chances, in exploring the edge where identifiable form shades into apparent randomness, and in discovering beauty and pleasure in the unexpected. His pictures have about them an air of improvisation, a freedom from deliberation and predictability; his photographic “touch” is attuned to subtle nuances more than to conspicuous gestures.  Geibert’s photographs reflect qualities of discernment and sophistication, a sense of timing and apparent ease that put one in mind of a performer who plays in the vicinity of the note and next to the beat, but who is never so common and obvious as to play right on them.

In addition to being superb in their own right, these photographs suggest that Geibert’s viewpoint has become more reflective and mature.  Much of his previous work is brilliant in its visual skewering of the foibles and fatuities of his subjects.  But in making these pictures from Germany, Geibert’s outstanding abilities serve a more sympathetic impulse.  They are the products of considerable sophistication and experience, yet they seem to present us with something akin to pure seeing.  We are in the hands of an artist so persuasive in his apparent self-effacement that he allows us the pleasure of rediscovering the astonishing richness of plain sight.

Sean Wilkinson
June 1992