Luigi Ghirri belongs to the Italian artistic panorama of the 60s and 70s and is considered one of the founding fathers of Italian photography given his particularly diversified role as a photographer, publisher, collector and curator.
On the occasion of Milan PhotoWeek, the Milan Triennale presents: Luigi Ghirri. The landscape of architecture.The exhibition intends to present in an unusual way the figure of the famous photographer from Emilia, highlighting the importance of his work in the field of architecture. Working in collaboration with Lotus International magazine since 1983 for about a decade, Ghirri has brought to architecture a new way of looking, able to understand the project in relation to the contradictory aspects and the difficulties of contemporary landscapes.
In the autumn of 1986 Ghirri created an extensive service about the Triennale, where he did not limit himself to photographing Palazzo dell’Arte, but he portrays architecture in relation to the Sempione park, photographs the park and several other buildings, monuments and works. Ghirri deals with the representation of a building so characteristic as the Palazzo dell’Arte, widening the gaze to the surrounding landscape, with a dynamic effect that characterizes its approach to architecture, a complex perceptive experience that includes many heterogeneous elements of the landscape. The results of this exploration show how Ghirri’s research path, here and always anchored to the present, has come to unexpectedly touch the romantic iconography, a theme that also occurs in other contemporary works.
Through a series of simple but deeply ambiguous and polysemic photographs, the author wants to bring the viewer back to a sort of precocious ingenuity, canceling the paradigms of modern society, characterized by accumulation and speed in observation, through an essentially superficial look . To understand his work we must resort to interpretation, decontextualization and simplicity.
It looks as if there is another landscape behind what I can see, the “real landscape”, but I am unable to sat what it is or picture it to myself. Out of the speakers of the car radio is coming the soundtrack of Blade Runner, and the music is strangely in keeping with what I am seeing. It seems as if the music is celebrating a liturgical rite, for the landscape, and the disemboweled mountain, that appears on the right, illuminated by the last rays of daylight does not appear as it is, i.e. grotesquely fantastic, but disturbingly normal.
