Contorted bodies and bare bottoms: Ralph Gibson’s all-seeing eye – in pictures

Black Trilogy, The Somnambulist, 1970

‘I had been a photographer for 10 years, and I thought I understood my work. During my first year in New York my reality began to change. Dramatically. I slept most of the day and worked at night. I was drawn to atonal music, concrete poetry and the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, who all enormously influenced my inner being’