Ben Gibson initially intended to pursue a career in the sciences, but changed his mind in his late teens after using a friend's darkroom to print up a box full of old family black-and-white negatives.

In 1979 following a short course in creative photography at the University of New Mexico, Ben Gibson was accepted on the documentary photography programme at Newport College of Art & Design, South Wales run by Magnum photographer David Hurn.

Shortly after graduation, he got his first freelance commission from Time Magazine, and six years later, while working fulltime on The Observer, found himself described by France's Photo and Italy's Corriera della Sera as one of Britain's most outstanding newspaper photojournalists. In 1988 after being involved in the successful rescue of a British Girl kidnapped in the Yemen, he left The Observer for The Sunday Times from where he went on to work for many of the world's leading magazines.

In 2003 Ben was seriously injured while on assignment, an event that was to change his outlook to life and photography. In 'Fearful Symmetry' his first collection of non-photojournalistic work - Gibson has set out to create an aesthetic that fuses his fascination for landscape with his sense of wonder at the new physics of the quantum world.