Luigi Ghirri, Project Prints

Luigi Ghirri

Project Prints

first edition, JRP Ringier 2012

“It is hard to say why a room, the stones of a road, the corner of a garden we have never seen, a wall, a color, a space, or a house suddenly become familiar, and ours. We feel we have inhabited these places and a feeling of total harmony makes us forget that all this existed and will continue to exist well beyond our own perception of it.”
Luigi Ghirri, Il paesaggio impossibile, 1989

The color photographs of Luigi Ghirri (born 1943) revolutionized Italian photography in the 1970s with their gentle humor and appearance of compositional ease. Often compared with the snapshot compositions of Lee Friedlander or William Eggleston, Ghirri's photographs, often verging on the surreal with their imaginative framing devices and visual puns, placed him in a category all his own. In the early 1980s, Ghirri began to use a medium-format camera that allowed him to produce large, richly textured negatives from whose contact sheets he would extract individual shots. He would then rearrange these small images in various permutations. These "project prints" enabled Ghirri to organize his work in a format that he maintained from the early 1980s until his death in 1992. They are now published for the first time in this volume.