The Matthew Marks Gallery is currently showing an exhibition of photographs by Luigi Ghirri, a land surveyor turned artist who was among the first in Italy to elevate color photography to the status of artistic expression.
Born in 1943, Ghirri began working with photography as a form of art in the 1970s. Traveling through the cities, agricultural landscapes, and tourist localities of his native Emilia Romagna, Ghirri developed a vast corpus of images that document and investigate the spaces, objects, and people of a region caught between its agrarian past and its touristic development, between domestic economies and consumerist culture. The photographs display, through a whirlwind of visual inputs that are very familiar to anyone who has lived during the 1970s and 1980s, the mix of familiarity and disorientation that characterized those years. It is a tour de force that carries the gravitas of the serial, methodical inquiry, and also a nostalgic longing for a distinctly Italian landscape that today has grown harder to recognize, and harder to transform into art.
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
Discussion about this post