The great renovation of Italian photography started in the eighties with photographer Luigi Ghirri from the italian region of Emilia Romagna, him before others knew how to create a dialogue between photography, art, architecture, literature and cinema. Painter of “thinking”, Luigi Ghirri has created something fascinating and not easy: the ability to use photography as intellectual tool but also emotional to get in touch with the complexity of the outside world trying to tell the very many stories that are woven into it, in a thin continuous search path that ends to coincide with existence itself.

Paris 1972 LUIGI GHIRRI
His work has had a special engraving on international visual culture. Until October 27, MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome, dedicates to the work of Luigi Ghirri a retrospective exhibition, extensive and organic, entitled Thinking in Pictures, a collaboration between the Museum and the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, the city where the photographer has lived and to which he left his archive of well over 250 thousand clicks.

Capri 1981 LUIGI GHIRRI
With the exposure of 300 shots, all vintage prints, the viewer is invited to retrace the steps of photographer’s aesthetic , divided into three thematic sections: Icons, Landscapes, Buildings. Icons relate to the beginning and portray the everyday; landscapes describe places of affection and affirmation; architectures immersed in landscapes, form a whole with the atmosphere that surrounds them, from those anonymous to those of author Aldo Rossi, Carlo Scarpa and Paolo Portoghese.

Venice 1987 LUIGI GHIRRI
On display also published books, magazines, reviews that testify his work as a publisher, critic and curator; a selection of photographs documenting encounters and collaborations with conceptual modenese artists in the early ’70s; record covers witnessing the interest of Ghirri for music, his relationship with musicians such as CCCP and Lucio Dalla.

Versailles 1985 LUIGI GHIRRI
Behind every shot lies a long meditation in which both personal expression and honesty with which the artist stands in front of his privacy emerge. Photographer experiences all situations that may amplify visual ambiguity through mirrors, glass, shadows and reflections; he assignes himself the task of digging up these common settings, that forgotten identity, through a use of color that will be more refined over the years and that has found more and more followers in contemporary filmmakers and photographers.

Bologna 1987 LUIGI GHIRRI
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