GHIRRI, Luigi - Luigi GHIRRI. Works from the 1970s

Background information

"This catalogue accompanies the solo exhibition 'Works from the 1970s' on the work by Italian photographer Luigi GHIRRI and is centered around photographs created during the 1970s, arguably GHIRRI’s most important creative period. By redefining photography as a concept and as an act, GHIRRI’s work has played an important role in expanding the possibilities of visual art. Luigi GHIRRI spent his youth in the 1950s and 1960s, during a time of economic growth and cultural transition. He familiarized himself with art at this time, and through conceptual art, one of the most popular movements of the era, he began making photographs collaboratively with other artists pursuing photographic images that were not merely documentary recordings. Founded on experimentalism, Luigi GHIRRI’s photographic practice is neither characterized by the professionalism of the studio photographer nor the amateurism of the photo fan. Through photography, he aimed to address the complexity and incomprehensibleness of the relation between the self and outside world. He trained his gaze at his subjects to acknowledge his positioning between the known and unknown. The themes and concepts addressed in works by Luigi GHIRRI are exceptionally diverse, but his photographs constitute a series of dialectical explorations focused on 'the gaze'. Through his practice, he ceaselessly, intensively, and gracefully explored the relation between reality and image.  His photographs demonstrate that images, such as ads and posters in public spaces, can be analytically categorized into 'images turned into reality' and 'reality turned into images'. They also show that the partial extraction and erasure of the world through framing exposes the ambiguous boundaries of reality and the changing form of the landscape, and that images projected by the viewer both produce and erase the actual and fantastic.  Luigi GHIRRI’s photographs are products of a search for harmony and diversity carried out by examining metaphysical binaries, such as reality and appearance (or mimicry), actuality and representation, presence and absence, and inner and outer worlds, at the same level. They indicate that photographs are not faithful reproductions of the world, but rather an assemblage of fragments of the 'seen' world. His works thus suggest that all photographs are testimonies of the gaze and pose an infinite number of questions about how we might think through the image." (publisher’s note, © Taka Ishi, 2017)

Content

The catalog offered here accompanied the solo exhibition 'Works from the 1970s' and focuses on photographs by Luigi GHIRRI taken in the 1970s, arguably Luigi GHIRRI's most important, because most creative period. The photographs selected for this catalog volume, capture and represent Luigi GHIRRI's views on the external and internal world, the relationship between reality and metaphysical duality, and the distance between reality and representation. 
The catalog is rounded out by an afterword, 'The Magic of Reproduction' by Jun Aoki in Japanese/English.

Additional information

Published in a limited edition in Japan, the catalog's design is characterized by the fact that the photographs are individually pasted and not printed. The book design comes from Yoshihisa TANAKA.

About the Italian photographer, Luigi GHIRRI (1943-1992)

Photo books by and on the work of Luigi GHIRRI