Luigi Ghirri: Il geroglifico totale

Luigi Ghirri was trained as a surveyor. He started to photograph professionally at the age of 30. Shortly afterwards, his work began to attract international attention. The 1975 annual edition of Time-Life Magazine devoted to photography chose him as “Person of the Year” and in 1977, driven by the success of his research, he established the publishing house, Punto e Virgola, with his wife Paola Borgonzoni. Through his publishing house he was able to affirm the growth of Italian photographic culture, publishing important monographs of photographers with the aim of educating a public that had little knowledge of photography as an art form in its own right. In 1978 he published the first photographic book of his own images, Kodachrome.

Ghirri used his camera to examine the relationship between the physical world and the world of images so in the field of photography his reference points were the photographers of the American and French schools. His figurative and literary culture instead is rooted in the poet- ics of the twentieth century: from the Dadaist objet trouvé to surrealism, from conceptual art to American pop art, from the poems of Rilke to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, declaring through a narrative in images the importance of the direct relationship between the spectator and the printed image: « I have always believed that photography is a language for seeing and not for transforming, masking, modifying reality […] Confident that a gaze free from formal acrobatics, forms of coercion, lucubration can find a balance between awareness and simplicity ». His images, which are often organized “in series” and designed for sequences and sensitive connections, are the result of research that has been meditated on for a long time before the shot is taken; reality and its details are analyzed through images that investigate the gaze through its reflection on the two-dimensional plane of photography: visual poetry for the curious eye that sees what usually escapes the visual field.

During the 1980s Ghirri began to photograph Italian landscapes (the Emilian countryside, the Royal Palace of Caserta, Capri, Apulia among others others) and abroad, such as the famous series made in Versailles, France: thanks to these projects of annotation and reinterpretation of the landscape, he was indicated as one of the most significant Italian authors in the history of 20th century photography.

The exhibition Il geroglifico totale presented at Travesía Cuatro CDMX commemorates the 30th anniversary of Luigi Ghirri’s death and offers a panorama of his photographic production from 1970 to the end of the 1980s through a selection of 52 vintage prints curated by Cristiano Raimondi and the Luigi Ghirri Archive.

The work of Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) has been the subject of several museum exhibitions in recent years, including at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin. In 2018 the first major retrospective of his work at a museum outside of Italy opened at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and later traveled to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Luigi Ghirri’s photographs can be found in prestigious private collections worldwide and museums such as the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Musée-Château (Annecy), Musée de la Photographie Réattu (Arles), Polaroid Collection (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Musée Nicéphore Niépce (Chalon-sur-Saòne), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan), Galleria Civica (Modena), Canadian Centre for Architecture – Centre Canadien d’Architecture (Montreal), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Cabinets des estampes – Bibliotèque Nationale (Paris), Fond National d’Art Contemporain (Paris), Fnac Collection (Paris), Biblioteca Panizzi – Fototeca (Reggio Emilia), Fondazione MAXXI (Rome) and Palazzo Braschi – Archivio Fotografico Comunale (Rome).