Light as intricately linked to the image of feminine elegance:Ralph Gibson's 'Leda'

“The alchemy of photography lies in taking unimportant objects or events and surpassing their appearance.”

‘Beauty in women inhabits a force field charged with particles of light,’ he said. ‘It is almost as if the light is the subject, and the woman the source of the light.’

Ralph Gibson.

The original photograph of Leda was shot in 1974. Leda refers to the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, consorted with a mortal woman, named Leda. Leda would later lay an egg from which Helen of Troy, daughter of Zeus, would hatch. Gibson’s stylized interpretation of this story - a tale that inspired some of the classic paintings of the Renaissance - has proved to be one of his most popular images