Luigi Ghirri: Mixing Anthropology And Metaphysics

It is the kind of tromp l'oeil picture that many an amateur has accidentally produced, but in this instance the result  is so perfectly achieved that you want to know who is the photographer  - and where exactly is he in relation to the other elements in the photo?  Has he risen from some watery deep just beyond the frame?  And when you learn that his name is Luigi Ghirri, you wonder why  that name is not familiar.

















Luigi Ghirri began his career with a sense that everything that could be done with photography had already been accomplished.  He spoke often of how deeply affected he was by the view of Earth photographed from the Apollo 11 spacecraft.  "It was not only the image of the entire world, but the image that contained all other images of the world."   From this, Ghirri extrapolated the idea of the image-within-image, a framing technique he would use in his photographs.  He brought the eye of an anthropologist to bear on the seemingly unremarkable sights that we see everyday but with an intensity that has been described as metaphysical, a word often applied to artists of Emilia-Romagna region, like Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi.    Ghirri called them his "sentimental geography" but that does not exhaust the interest of, say,  those yellow traffic lights bobbing in the fog

Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) grew up in the northern province of Emilia-Romagna.   A  temperate area of broad fertile plains, fed by the Po River, it  was created millennia ago  when the sea retreated, leaving  marshlands as it retreated.  The young  Ghirri moved to Modena, a small city but no  backwater, located near Bologna, the regional capitol and home of the oldest university in the world.   His studies in surveying and graphic design coalesced in a new hobby -  taking pictures - that quickly became his chosen work.

















Conceiving his photographs mostly in series, Ghirri presented them in books more often than in exhibitions which may have limited their initial  impact.  His first book Kodachrome, published in 1978,  featured the tightly cropped images that would familiar in his work. 
Ghirri's last home was at Roncosesi, not  far from where he was born.  Although he traveled,  he found all that he needed for his work there.   Formal, cerebral, witty, Ghirri always intended his photographs to explore rather than merely represent what was before him.

Although admired during his lifetime, Ghirri's work has only grown in importance since his untimely death from a heart attack at the age of forty-nine.  "...(N)ow, in their faded and aging present state, Ghirri’s prints from the 1970s and ’80s signal themselves as relics of the first wave of the then-new colour photography, carrying with them both prescience and nostalgia.." Christy Lange wrote for Frieze in 2011.

In 2009, the Aperture Gallery in Manhattan hosted the retrospective It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It?, devoted to the work of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992).  Then, in 2013,  Matthew Marks Gallery, also in New York, devoted an exhibition  to Luigi Ghirri: Kodachrome.  This exhibition coincides with the republication of Ghirri's much admired book Kodachrome, by MACK, London, UK: 2012., a book he originally published himself in 1978.

Images: The estate of Luigi Ghirri is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC.
1. Paris (self-portrait in reflection), 1976, reprinted from Kodachrome, 1978, reprinted London: 2012.

2. Valli Grandi - Veronese, undated.
3. Fagnano Olona - elementary school designed by Aldo Rossi, 1985, Pompidou Center, Paris.
4. Reggio Emilia, 1973, Pompidou Center, Paris.