BEN GIBSON-COWAN
Born in 1958, Ben spent his early years at the High Rocks, a dramatic sandstone outcrop of precipitous ravines and giant boulders set in the Weald of South east England. It was, he recalls, a childhood of endless discovery and adventures that instilled in him a life long passion for all that was visually epic and elemental.
At age seven, after his father a writer and former journalist died, he was sent away to boarding school where his fascination with the sciences began. However, in his mid teens, after finding a box containing his father’s old black-and-white negatives, he abandoned all ideas of a scientific career and made the decision to become a photographer instead.
After briefly attending a course in creative photography at the University of New Mexico, Ben was accepted onto, the prestigious documentary photography course run by Magnum photographer David Hurn in Newport South Wales.
Within a month of graduating he had undertaken his first freelance assignment for TIME Magazine, and six years later, while working on The Observer found himself described as one of Britain’s leading photojournalists by France’s Photo and Italy’s Corriera della Sera.
Later under the byline Ben Gibson, Ben went on to work for the Sunday Times and many of the worlds’ leading publications covering major global events in over a hundred countries. However in 2003 while on an assignment he was seriously injured in a helicopter crash while in the ex soviet republic of Georgia, and in the months of rehabilitation that followed, began to develop a radically new outlook to his life and photography.
‘Fearful Symmetry’, reflects his growing interest in conceptual work and a marks a major departure from his former editorial career. Currently Ben is working on a new and related project entitled ‘ In Darkness Visible’.