Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays 1973–1991

Publisher's Description

Luigi Ghirri (1942–1992) started writing about photography from the moment he became a photographer: for his own publications, for Italian magazines and newspapers, as well as private reflections committed to paper, where his thoughts might settle and then depart in new directions.

Published for the first time in English, The Complete Essays, 1973–1991 comprises sixty-eight texts, mostly only one or two pages long. The exercise of writing always accompanied Ghirri’s photographic practice, and he approached the same subjects at the core of his photographs, only distilled through a different medium – themes of identity, time, memory, vision, representation, and sense of place. At the same time, as a voracious reader with a particular taste for the eclectic, Ghirri also reaches outwards from his own practice, as he considers the work of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Adams and John Gossage, weaving in references to musicians, writers and painters alike. As themes and ideas overlap, the compilation of texts create a sort of dialectic chamber of curiosities that includes Gulliver, Van Gogh’s yellow house, Aldo Rossi’s pale pink and blue architecture, Cézanne, Morandi’s studio, Mallarmé, the fireworks above Trani Cathedral and the multicoloured lights on Ponza, neo-realist films, Blade Runner, lots of music (Bob Dylan, Lucio Dalla, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis), Francis Bacon, Schopenhauer, McLuhan’s global village, Pessoa, poetry. Together, the essays offer an unintentional yet comprehensive treatise on the history and theory of photography, and above all, they constitute a special form of autobiography.

Born in Scandiano in 1942, Luigi Ghirri spent his working life in the Emilia Romagna region, where he produced one of the most open and layered bodies of work in the history of photography. He was published and exhibited extensively both in Italy and internationally and was at the height of his career at the time of his death in 1992. His first book, Kodachrome (1978), an avant-garde manifesto for the medium of photography and a landmark in his own remarkable oeuvre, was re-published by MACK in 2012.

Publisher: Mack

Size: 140 x 228 mm

240 pages, 50 colour plates

65,000 words