Untitled (Self-Portrait)

Gibson grew up in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s where his father worked as an assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock and where Gibson himself frequently worked as a child actor. The mark of this early experience can be seen in the high-contrast, grainy quality of his photographs. Other formal devices that contribute an air of mystery to his pictures are the intimate close-up, the tight focus on a fragmentary detail, the play of positive and negative space, and his use of deep black shadow. His photographs are more surreal dreamscapes than documents of reality. Gibson has summarized his aesthetic as a desire to make photographs that are "not boring."