Luigi Ghirri is a spectator of simplicity. This simplicity is not a result of negligence but the result of him crossing the border of seeing correctly. His simple photographs have repeatedly crossed the borders of thought and are now framed before our eyes. To truly understand his work, we need to answer the question of how to see simplicity more frequently, better, and more precisely. The same thing that William Eggleston or Martin Per do to us. Behind every simplicity is a complexity, and behind every nested thought a simple frame manifests.

Writing about Luigi Ghirri is not easy because his photos are complexity hidden in simplicity. The bold features of his work are the paleness and modesty, faded and often matte colors, and layered frames. It is safe to say that there is no photograph in all of his works that you can grasp a fixed and clear understanding of. In addition, what makes him so different are the living statements of his photographs. His writing is shoulder-to-shoulder with his photography. His photographs are a testament to his writing and his writing a backbone to his photographs.

He is very interested in looking from above, especially the idea that anything encompasses everything. In one of his essays in The Complete Essays, he refers to the astronauts' first photograph on the moon and says that it is the first photograph that not only includes all the other photographs but also the entire story of mankind. It includes his aspirations and dreams, landscapes, lands, roads, and all that there is and there is not. This effort to include the whole in a fraction is seen in all of his works. In his other book, The Atlante, he takes a visual journey into the world of maps: "Now there are only signs left for us." Perhaps no other way can be found but to reinterpret its signs.

His photos are multi-layered. In the image in which the name of the sea, MARE, is in front of the image of the sea, the frame is simple on the surface. It is something that makes us think to understand the meanings of the layers and why each one is placed is an inexhaustible story. Another photo, “Bastia,” shows a torn photo of a ship. The rupture of the photo is curved as if the ship is its own missing half. The half that exists rides the wave of non-existent and plunges into a sea of the abstract. This photo is the essence of playing with a photo: A photo that is not a photo and a photo that is just a photo. Photography of photographs is the signature of Ghirri’s work.

He is Italian and died at the age of forty-nine at the top of his artistic career. He published his first book, Kodchrome, in 1978, which was an avant-garde work in Italian photography and color photography. He has another book called Projects Prints that includes his photographs taken with his medium format camera. His first published work in the United States is a collection of his essays and color photographs called It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It? He mentions William Eggleston and his works often and sees his seemingly effortless frames as a suitable response to the world around him. Of course, Ghirri’s photography does not have the color and pomp of Eggleston's photographs. In other words, color is not the first and most important part of Ghirri’s work. Colors in his works do not try to convey meaning. Even the layers, words, posters, and advertisements he photographed tell us nothing. This is exactly the magic of simplicity in Ghirri’s work. It gives us the illusion that we can also take such photo. It looks so familiar, as if we've seen it somewhere before. So facile that it doesn’t belong to any specific group of people. It belongs to anyone who has the ability to see.

fall, 2020

*This is a translation of a photography note from a review series written for herfeh.honarmand, an art magazine in Iran