By concentrating on the visual fragment and artfully intentional, edge-conscious composition, Ralph Gibson has, for more than thirty years, produced photographs which elicit in the viewer a sense of déja vu (the title of one of his early monographs); they seem at once fleeting and hyperreal, mysterious and mundane. While suggesting the presence of a narrative, they in fact reveal very little. Despite, or perhaps because of these qualities, Gibson’s vision has become a much imitated stylistic trope on photographic book covers from the mid 1980's into the present. KB

Covering Photography is a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design. Read more about the project.