Luigi Ghirri - Paesaggio Italiano - 1996

Luigi Ghirri (5 January 1943 1992) was an Italian photographer. Born in Scandiano, Ghirri began taking photographs in 1970, mostly working in a milieu of conceptual artists. From 1983 he focussed primarily on photographing architecture and the Italian landscape. Ghirri also was notable for organising such exhibitions as Iconicittà (1980), Viaggio in Italia (1984), and Esplorazioni sull via Emilia (1986). He worked for the Architectural Section of the third Venice Biennale of Architecture (1985), which was directed by Aldo Rossi, and the Milan Triennale (1988). Ghirri's books include Paesaggio italiano/Italian Landscape (1989) and Il profilo delle nuvole (1989). A rare title of one of the best known italian photographer. "Ghirri uses space, place, and landscape to question our relation to the external world and its representations, and to revalue the role of photography and art. In particular, Ghirri's poetics of space moves from insistent decontextualization and estrangement to a notion of affective space, combining a sense of inhabiting with one of errance, a fascination with the new with a nostalgia for the old and the marginal, and a critique of contemporary society with an attachment to a sense of place and of the individual as vanishing traces.", Marina Spunta in Italian Studies, Volume 61, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 114-136(23).