Luigi Ghirri was born in Scandiano (Reggio Emilia) in 1943 and died in Roncocesi (Reggio Emilia) in 1992.
Considered one of the most important and influential figures in the panorama of contemporary photography, Ghirri started his work in 1970 on the basis of an approach matured within conceptual art, and his research made him famous on the international scene. In 1973 he produced Atlante and held his first solo show in Modena. In 1975 he was among the Discoveries in Time-Life’s Photography Year and he participated in the exhibition Photography as Art in Kassel.
In 1977, with Paola Borgonzoni and Giovanni Chiaramonte, he founded the publisher Punto e Virgola, with which in 1978 he published Kodachrome (1978), the result of research he had started at the beginning of the decade.
In 1979 the CSAC at the University of Parma devoted a major retrospective to him.
In 1982 he was invited to take part in the show Photographie 1922-1982 at the Photokina fair of Cologne, where he was recognised as one of the most significant artists in the history of 20th-century photography. The following year the magazine Lotus International assigned him to photograph the Modena cemetery of Aldo Rossi. He then launched on an intensive project aimed at the analysis of Italian architecture and landscape, producing volumes on Capri with Mimmo Jodice in 1983, on Emilia Romagna in 1985-1986 and on Aldo Rossi in 1987.
He was also a regular contributor to the magazine Lotus International . He carried out important work as an organiser of shows, including Iconicittà in 1980 at the PAC in Ferrara, Penisola in 1983 at the Forum Stadtpark of Graz, the itinerant show Viaggio in Italia in 1984 and in the same year Descrittiva for the Rimini City Council. In 1985 he completed a work on the Città Universitaria of Piacentini and the following year commenced a project for the reading of the Padua landscape Esplorazioni lungo la via Emilia. In 1988 the book Il Palazzo dell’Arte by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle was published, complete with Ghirri’s photographic research on the leading Italian and foreign museums. In 1989 he conceived the Paesaggio Italiano project, a monograph that was published to coincide with the exhibition held in Reggio Emilia, which was then taken to Mantua and went on to tour various Italian Cultural Institutes in South America. This project, an authentic artist’s book, constitutes a crucial phase in Ghirri’s poetics. It defines the inseparable bond between external landscape and internal landscape, rendering explicit the mechanism of the vision on which his work is based: he draws upon the sedimentation of memory by association of ideas, thus sparking a new imaginative possibility of creating his own highly personal “sentimental geography” of the landscape. In 1991 he completed a work on Giorgio Morandi on which he had been engaged for two years.
Between 1990 and 1992, which was effectively his last project and for this reason too particularly precious, Luigi Ghirri produced the curious book entitled Il ciclo pittorico di Piazza Betlemme in S.Giovanni Persiceto dipinto da Gino Pellegrini, with critical and philological appendices edited by the Università del Progetto di Reggio Emilia. The university published the book as part of a series called Classici dell’Illusione, with an ironic nod towards the Classici dell’Arte Rizzoli, an evergreen of this genre of publication of artistic divulgation.
His works are conserved in various museums all over the world, including: Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Musée-Château (Annecy), Musée de la Photographie Réattu (Arles), Polaroid Collection (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Musée Nicéphore Niépce (Chalon-sur-Saône), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano), Archivio dello Spazio-Amministrazione Provinciale (Milan), Galleria Civica (Modena), Canadian Centre for Architecture-Centre Canadien d’Architecture (Montreal), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Cabinets des estampes - Bibliotèque Nationale (Paris), Fond National d’Art Contemporain (Paris), Collezione Fnac (Paris), Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (Parma), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Galleria d’arte moderna (Turin), Biblioteca Panizzi-Fototeca (Reggio Emilia), Palazzo Braschi-Archivio Fotografico Comunale (Rome) and the Fond National d’Art Contemporain (Paris).
