This June 2026, MPB — Europe’s leading camera reseller — partners with Blind and legendary American photographer Ralph Gibson for an unprecedented contest. Blind readers are invited to enter to win the Leica M Typ 246 owned and used by Gibson himself for the past 15 years with its Summilux 50mm lens, along with a signed and numbered print from his 1996 series “Light Years.” The chance to hold a piece of photographic history.
Ralph Gibson needs no introduction to anyone who has spent time with photography books. Since the publication of The Somnambulist in 1970, Gibson built one of the most singular bodies of work in the medium: radically formal, intimate, and entirely his own. His trilogy — The Somnambulist, Déjà-Vu (1973), and Days at Sea (1975), all published under his own imprint Lustrum Press — changed the way photographers thought about sequencing, negative space, and the book as an object. He worked as assistant to both Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank before striking out on his own path.
The Leica M Typ 246 offered to Blind readers is the very instrument Gibson used during a pivotal period of his practice, a period in which he deepened his exploration of tonal abstraction and formal compression. Alongside the camera and the Summilux 50mm lens, the winner will also receive a signed and numbered print from Light Years, published as a book in 1996: an image that exemplifies Gibson’s signature approach : a fragment, a shadow, and a cropped body as pure form.
Ralph Gibson, 2021 © Bob Tursack
Untitled from the series Light Years, 1996 © Ralph Gibson
Ralph Gibson’s Leica, lens and print to win © MPB
“Whatever you do: try to be original. All I really have to offer people, beyond the work itself, is that I was able to achieve whatever I’ve achieved by trying to be original. The real question, for somebody serious about photography, is: does the camera inform how you see, or do you inform the camera how you see?”
Ralph Gibson has worked exclusively with Leica cameras since 1961. Over six decades of continuous partnership with the same tool. For him, the camera has never been the subject of technical inquiry but of intimate familiarity: the body, the lens, and the eye operate as a single instrument. His adoption of the Leica M Typ 246, a milestone in the brand’s digital rangefinder lineage, is part of a broader and deliberate embrace of digital photography. “I have no nostalgia for the past,” Gibson says. “I have an enormous nostalgia for the future.”
Published in 1996, Light Years gathered three and a half decades of Gibson’s work into a single volume, a survey of his formal obsessions and visual protocols. The print offered alongside the Leica M Typ 246 is a signed and numbered edition from the series of photographs published in that book: a work that distills everything Gibson has spent his career building toward. It arrives in a box, ready to be framed and hung.
1961 © Ralph Gibson
1974 © Ralph Gibson
1969 © Ralph Gibson
This contest takes place as part of MPB’s ongoing commitment to making photography more accessible and sustainable. The campaign is made possible thanks to the support of our partner MPB. MPB supports creative communities across Europe and is the first camera reseller to publish sustainability commitments, guided by its purpose: to open up the world of visual storytelling in a way that’s good for people and the planet.
Want to win Ralph Gibson’s Leica M Typ 246 and the signed and numbered print from “Light Years”? Register to take part in the giveaway via MPB.
About Ralph Gibson
Ralph Gibson was born in 1939 in Los Angeles. After serving in the US Navy — where he first trained as a photographer — he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. He worked as an assistant to Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank in the early 1960s and was briefly a member of Magnum Photos. In 1970, he founded Lustrum Press and published The Somnambulist, a book that marked a decisive break with documentary tradition and established Gibson as one of the most original voices in contemporary photography. He has since published more than thirty books, including the Taschen retrospective that gathers nearly six hundred pages of his life’s work. He has lived and worked in New York for decades and was awarded France’s Légion d’honneur. He has used Leica cameras exclusively since 1961.
About the Leica M Typ 246
The Leica M Typ 246 is a full-frame digital rangefinder camera and one of the most significant milestones in Leica’s modern history. Featuring a 24-megapixel CMOS sensor, live view capability, and video recording, the M Typ 246 brought Leica’s iconic M-series into a new era while preserving the mechanical precision and optical compatibility that photographers had relied on for generations. Designed for those who value intentionality over automation, it remains one of the most coveted tools in contemporary photography.
About MPB
Founded in 2011, MPB has always been committed to making gear more accessible and affordable, and helping to visualize a more sustainable future. MPB now recirculates over 600,000 items a year, extending the life and creative potential of photo and video equipment for creators around the world.