Luigi Ghirri

Luigi Ghirri – A quiet revolutionary out of nowhere 

Luigi Ghirri was born in Scandiano near Reggio Emilia on 5 January 1943. His career can barely be traced, as if he took to the stage of art as a fully accomplished master in the early 1970s. Under the clearly noticeable influence of the conceptual art of his time, he celebrated his premiere with two series of pictures of heavily cropped, expressionless landscapes: Atlante (1973) and Kodachrome (1978). Even in these early photographs, it is clear that Luigi Ghirri wasn’t interested in the classic beautiful picture, in capturing a special moment, like many of his famous colleagues. Instead, he turned to things that did not seem worth the effort, things that would not really be counted as motifs of good taste. Ghirri was interested in the uninteresting, he saw the exciting in the thread and found colour in paleness. This new way of photographing signified a quiet revolution in photography; it came out of nowhere and instantly attracted much attention. 

Reality as wonderland

Luigi Ghirri did not show reality with his pictures, but rather an amiable, almost nostalgically transfigured cliché of reality. The enraptured depiction of nature in Ghirri’s photographs is occasionally associated with the colour film The Red Desert, shot by his compatriot Michelangelo Antonioni in 1964 around Ravenna. Antonioni had arranged for the trees and grass to be painted white for the surreal, ethereal effect of the landscape in his film – a process that seems like a scene from Lewis Carroll’s famous children’s book Alice in Wonderland. With his small-format photographs, Luigi Ghirri succeeded in rapturing the everyday, and although this series of picture are often reminiscent of film sequences, they are imbued with a curious immobility. 

The world as a pipe-dream

Luigi Ghirri compiled extensive writings of his understanding of photography and thus made a valuable contribution to photographic theory. In them, he laid out early on that he understood the world to be in transition towards an artificial reality that is increasingly changing into an intended backdrop through the yearning intervention and reshaping of man. He himself, as artist, did not require a photomontage as this had already taken place in reality and was only put into perspective by him. Luigi Ghirri never proved himself a cynic in his documentation of this world marked by kitsch and consumption, but rather an amiable and humorous observer who got so close with his lens to the illusions and beautiful pretense that the backdrops, built with such care, suddenly become visible and thus unveiled. At the same time, Luigi Ghirri succeeded in playing with human longings which he also reinforced with his pictures, despite all unmaskings. 

Luigi Ghirri died on 14 February in Roncocesi from a heart attack. He was only 49 years old.