LUIGI GHIRRI – PROJECT PRINTS
2011-09-05Luigi Ghirri Project Prints will be both a journey through Ghirri’s work and through Italy. During the 1980s the concept of landscape became increasingly important for Ghirri. He sought to create a new iconography of the Italian landscape, one that could incorporate both tradition and modernity. In the important series Paesaggio Italiano, many images from which are included in this exhibition, Ghirri looked to evoke a particular sense of place. He wrote, “I would like this work on the Italian landscape to seem more about the perception of a place than its cataloguing or description.”
In the early 1980s Ghirri started to use a medium format camera producing larger negatives, clearly not for the sake of technique itself, but as if to “get inside” the subject more intensely. The centrality of thought and the sense of the project continued to be the necessary conditions for his work during those years, to such an extent that these negatives actually turned out to be another project tool he could resort to. Thanks to these matrices Ghirri was able to produce excellent contact prints, small photographs that he could cut out, file and line up in order to see each image, plan his series, organize his own view, even leaving them loose and then bringing them together again in endless combinations. These small photographs that enabled Luigi Ghirri to organize his own view from the early 1980s until 1992 were the Project Prints.
Opposite – Bari,1982
Exhibition runs September 14th to October 29th, 2011
Mummery + Schnelle
83 Great Titchfield Street
London
W1W 6RH
