Luigi Ghirri: The Complete Essays 1973-1991. Book Review

I had already read a few of these essays when I realised that no one would try to persuade me that photography “records” or “represents” reality. A reader is credited from the start, that is, with an appreciation of the ways photographs project, suggest, sketch possibilities, with an understanding that its relationship to reality depends on time, place, chemistry, luck, state of mind and much more, but that there is never a simple equation. Photographers always know this — I mean people who really have spent hours and years learning to look in a particular way, to anticipate — quickly — how a given combination of light, camera, and film will respond in a specific situation, and to respond to their own and others’ photographically invented realities. Whether they take any interest in writing is of course an entirely different matter.
Ghirri seems not only to have known and loved photographic images from early childhood, and to have realised that his particular way of seeing the world was unique. He further recognised language as another means of helping people to see photographs. Many of these essays were published as reviews of specific exhibitions, sometimes of his own work, but more often of the work of others.
I knew nothing of Luigi Ghirri’s work until I learned that these English translations of his collected essays had just been published. It is an admirable achievement: quiet, careful, consistent. It even has its own “frame”: at the beginning and again at the end of Ghirri mentions two books that were memorable features of his childhood — references, in some sense. One was a commercial atlas of the world, with bright, intriguing photographs of exotic places and people, the other an album of family photographs, focussed on a few people in familiar places — a bit random and highly personal. He cherished both, conventionally “good” images sharing a highly accessible fiction, as well as the evidence of a unique sensibility in an unrepeatable time and place. Ghirri described his work in dialogue between the two.