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Electa has published the catalogue of the exhibition Luigi Ghirri.

‘Luigi Ghirri:
The Landscape of Architecture, curated by Michele Nastasi,
Architecture, Word presented in the spaces of the Triennale di Milano (May 25 –
August 26, 2018).
and Image’ / Born out of collaboration between the Museo di Fotografia
‘Architettura, Contemporanea and the Triennale, the exhibition brings out the
importance of Luigi Ghirri‘s work in architecture, through his
Imagine e Parola’ ten-year collaboration – between 1983 and 1992 – with the review
“Lotus International”.
LUIGI GHIRRI: IL Ghirri brought to architecture a freer way of conceiving reality,
PAESAGGIO based no longer on the reduction and exclusion of the infinite
DELL'ARCHITETTURA, subjects of the world, but on their inclusion in a timely image, a
ELECTA, 2018 reading of the landscape in which architecture, in its different
forms and different times, is relocated in the present.
With texts by David Campany, Elio Grazioli, Angelo Maggi,
Michele Nastasi, Pierluigi Nicolin.

Architecture, Image and Word

by David Campany

Although deceptively simple and unforced, Luigi Ghirri’s

photographic observations of architecture were the result of his
wide learning and his appreciation not just of built form but of the
long and rich history of its representation.

The basic craft of photography could not be simpler, particularly

for the kind of notational images Ghirri made with his good but
rudimentary camera. Beyond the choices of vantage point,
framing and exposure there was not much more to his
photographic procedure. What gives Ghirri’s images their

distinctive and sophisticated character is his disposition and his

ability to use a camera to join his interest in what was in front of
him with an intellectual and aesthetic understanding of how his
seeing was informed by what he had experienced and learned
already. In almost every photograph by Ghirri there are echoes
and resonances of other images, other times, other places.

A history has yet to be written of the ways that important

photographic artists have found sympathetic support and
opportunities in the progressive magazines dedicated to
architecture. Many of these publications, including the The
Architectural Review and AA Files (UK), Architectural Forum
(USA) and Lotus International (Italy) have seen themselves not
just as showcases for the best practices, but as discursive spaces
that understand architecture in relation to all the other arts, past
and present. The imagery and ideas they have published have
not been merely documentary or promotional, but at times highly
reflective and experimental.

The development, spread and reception of architectural

modernism and what became known as the International Style,
was inseparable from the photographic image. These were
buildings that lent themselves to black and white photography as
reproduced on the pages of magazines and books. In
modernism, architecture and image entered a new and complicit
relationship, one that has troubled many commentators,
photographers and architects. When architecture presents itself
as mere image it is diminished. Likewise if photography is forced
merely to serve architecture, it too is diminished.

Luigi Ghirri’s work was resistant to this kind of diminishment but

not in any strategic way. He simply saw that photography’s
relation to architecture could be richer, multi-layered, subjective
and as a result truer to experience. Take for example his much-
loved photograph of the Palace of Versailles, shot in 1985, which
appears on the cover of Lotus International no. 52. There is a
beguiling formal perfection here, but it is not quite the perfection
of the architect’s ideal view of the building and its gardens.
Instead Ghirri finds his own formality, one that recognizes the
architectural desire but also makes us see what has happened to
Versailles. The place is a living archaism, a tourist destination, and
a site of time travel. The clarity of the light makes everything
visible but it also makes it uncanny. Ghirri permits us to see the
place almost as a model of itself, plucked out of time for our
contemplation.

In that same issue of Lotus International, Ghirri published his little

essay ‘Objective Vision’. He wrote of his desire for a ‘holistic
photography’, one that was open to all influences, from painting
and cinema to music, literature and poetry. He noted too how
photography could play with time, sliding the present into the
past, while summoning the past within the present. Indeed, for
Ghirri photography could only be honest if it accepted all these
complicated influences, which of course had to include
photography itself. He could not, and would not, separate his
love of making photographs from his love of looking at the
photographs of others that he admired. He reserved particular
affection for American image-makers: Paul Strand, Robert Frank,
Lee Friedlander and what he called the ‘ethical rigour’ of Walker
Evans. Today of course it is Ghirri’s parallel with the American
colour photographers of his own generation that resonates. Look
at his photograph of Versailles next to Joel Meyerowitz’s 1977
view of the baseball stadium in St Louis, or Stephen Shore’s
‘Church and 2nd Streets, Easton, Pennsylvania, June 20, 1974’. All
three seem to share the same affection for the appearance of
space and light, and the same intuition that within the camera’s
objectivity is a capacity to estrange the world and make it
thinkable.

Ghirri is quite rightly celebrated today as a highly original

photographer-writer. While his words were imagistic, his pictures
were a weave of inter-textual references and quotations. His
characteristic mix of philosophical reflection, poetic leaps, and
cultural commentary is as present in his writings as in his images.
Moreover, it is clear that Lotus Internationalallowed him to
experiment and develop. The sensibility that he pursued on the
pages of the magazine soon blossomed into Paesaggio Italiano /
Italian Landscape, the book published in 1989. Its combination of
short essays and images – always linked, yet always distinct – is
perhaps the richest summation of Ghirri’s approach.

It is illuminating to look at precedents for the kind of visual-verbal

presentations Ghirri was making in Lotus International. For
example in the 1930s the British artist Paul Nash contributed a
number of highly idiosyncratic pieces to various magazines.
‘Swanage, or Seaside Surrealism’ (Architectural Review, April
1936) was a gentle mockery of the ugliness of an English coastal
resort that had been saved from irrelevance by items of
architectural salvage brought from London and scattered
incongruously around the town. Nash took the photographs and
wrote his commentary almost as a parody of architectural
guidebook prose. Swanage was a montage of fragments and
impressions, a living museum of objets trouvés. And what Nash
was conveying to the reader was not a neutral report but the
fertile findings of an exploratory mind.

In January 1958 Architectural Forum published ‘Color Accidents’,

a photo essay by Walker Evans. It presented square compositions
picked out from the weathered walls of a New York street. In the
accompanying text Evans compares but distances these walls
them from abstract painting, which was then at its popular height:

‘The pocks and scrawls of abandoned walls recall the style of

certain contemporary paintings, with, of course, the fathomless
difference that the former are accidents untouched by the hand
of consciousness. Paul Klee would have jumped out of his shoes
had he come across the green door below. The courage, purity
and gaiety of these scarlet shots in violent green space would be
applauded by all the Klee audience.’[i]

Evans’s photographs are consummate formal exercises, but the

words emphasize that what is important are the walls themselves.
The images are artful documents of things Evans wants his
readers to notice out in the world. Ghirri worked in this way too.
There are clear parallels between these images by Evans and the
many that Ghirri made throughout his life of marked walls.

Beyond the insistence on personal interest and expression, what

Ghirri’s work at Lotus International shares with Nash and Evans is
an interest in the complex accretion of time within space.
Modern architecture so often denied the past, preferring
materials like glass, steel and concrete that were intended not to
age or show the passage of time. This is essentially inhuman, a
disavowal of the notion that all things must pass. All buildings
exist in a world that precedes them and will outlive them. In the
1970s and 1980s, Stephen Shore photographed architecture in a
similar way to Ghirri. Years later Shore summarized his thoughts
in a short essay, ‘Photography and Architecture’:

‘A building expresses the physical constraints of its materials: a

building made of curved I-beams and titanium can look different
from one made of sandstone blocks. A building expresses the
economic constraints of its construction. A building also
expresses the aesthetic parameters of its builder and its culture.
This latter is the product of all the diverse elements that make up
‘style’: traditions, aspirations, conditioning, imagination,
posturings, perceptions. On a city street, a building is sited
between others built or renovated at different times and in
different styles. And these buildings are next to still others. And
this whole complex scene experiences the pressure of weather
and time. This taste of the personality of a society becomes
accessible to a camera.’[ii]

Luigi Ghirri would have recognized this sentiment, and

understood that in the right hands photography is uniquely
placed to express it.

Of course, what all these photographer-writers were concerned

with was the violence of modern progress. The arrogant erasure

of the past. The dangerous and deliberate forgetting that
impoverishes us all by cutting us off from what determines our
lives and the spaces we inhabit. But there’s not a shred of
nostalgia in Ghirri. Rather, there is an acceptance that any society
that does not live in the past a little, the present a lot and the
future a little will turn mad and murderous. Sooner or later. There
is also in Ghirri a clear adherence to the two great unspoken
tenets of the avant-garde: to point out what’s wrong with the
world, and to show us beauty where we thought there was none.

[i] Walker Evans, ‘Color Accidents,’ Architectural Forum 108, no. 1,

January 1958.

[ii] Stephen Shore, ‘Photography and Architecture’ (1997) in

Christy Lange et al, Stephen Shore, (Phaidon Press, 2008).
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