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Luigi Ghirri installation images, Barbican Art Gallery, 25 Sept 2014 \u2013 11 Jan 2015, \u00a9 Chris Jackson \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
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On 11 December 2014, Jacopo Benci gave a gallery presentation of Ghirri\u2019s work included in the Barbican exhibition \u2018Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age\u2019 (25 September 2014\u201311 January 2015):<\/p>\n
I gave a \u2018gallery talk\u2019 on Ghirri\u2019s photographs of three projects by Aldo Rossi: the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena (1971\u2013ongoing), the Elementary School in Fagnano Olona (1972\u201376) and the Secondary School in Broni (1979\u201381). It was a talk given to a group of 20 people, standing in front of the works, in the exhibition space.<\/p>\n
I started by giving some context on who Rossi and Ghirri were, what backgrounds they came from. This was because I am aware that very few people in Britain \u2013 apart of course from those studying, or interested in, 20th century Italy \u2013 have a clear idea of the social, cultural, and political context of Italian arts.<\/p>\n
In particular, I explained that Aldo Rossi (1931-97) was a student at the Milan Polytechnic from 1949 to 1959 and that in 1955 he was invited to join the editorial desk of Casabella Continuit\u00e0<\/em> by its editor in chief, architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (one of the principal partners of the Italian modernist practice BBPR). Rogers\u2019s reappraisal of tradition in the 1950s contributed to the shaping of Rossi\u2019s particular vision, though this was mainly linked to his study of utopian eighteenth-century architect Etienne-Louis Boull\u00e9e and early modernist architect Adolf Loos (other authors he saw as seminal were Raymond Roussel, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille).<\/p>\n To introduce Ghirri, I gave an overview of his training as a land surveyor rather than as a photographer or fine artist, and how as a practitioner and intellectual he was largely self-taught, though his encounters with the \u2018Modena conceptualists\u2019, and later with intellectuals such as Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Cesare De Seta, and Vittorio Savi, certainly helped him in his intellectual and artistic progress. Then I discussed the photographs on exhibit while referring to Ghirri\u2019s and Rossi\u2019s writings, especially Rossi\u2019s Note autobiografiche sulla formazione<\/em> (1971), and Architetture padane<\/em>, a joint project with Ghirri (Casa del Mantegna, Mantova, 1984), and statements by Ghirri on the San Cataldo cemetery project, in particular, and on Aldo Rossi, from 1985, 1987, 1990.<\/p>\n As Ghirri recalled in 1985, the offer to photograph Aldo Rossi\u2019s Modena cemetery in 1983 \u2018came from the magazine Lotus<\/em>, but it was [Vittorio] Savi, who had written an essay on some of my series of photographs, to insist that the task was entrusted to me. I must say that the shift from anonymous architecture to cultured architecture was not difficult. My gaze was that of a participant observer.\u2019 According to Ghirri, architectural photography as it had been practiced up to then was:<\/p>\n a process that begins with the project design, passes through stages that we know well, and is resolved in the artefact. The artefact is then authenticated by photography. This path produces the stereotype of \u2018architectural photography\u2019, which I think is now really worn out. More than authenticating the \u2018vision\u2019 of the architect, my gaze and my approach would like to reveal hidden aspects and functions, and return an image of the lived experience of architecture.<\/p>\n For Ghirri, instead, architecture:<\/p>\n lives, it lives of subtle and fascinating spatial and temporal changes, even in the weather. [\u2026] I am interested in working in sequences related to each minimal variation that makes architecture alive. So for example, I photograph at different times of day, to show how light can change and transform; to make comparisons between how architecture appears in the morning light, in the twilight, or in the dark of the night; or to verify how it is lived.<\/p>\n [Luigi Ghirri, \u2018Fotografare i luoghi, fotografare le architetture. Interview by M. Lupano\u2019 [c. 1985], in P. Costantini, G. Chiaramonte (eds), Luigi Ghirri. Niente di antico sotto il sole<\/em>, Turin: SEI, 1997, pp. 294-95 (my translation from the Italian).]<\/p>\n In 1987, he described how he had approached Rossi\u2019s edifices at San Cataldo:<\/p>\n Living in Modena and happening to see the cemetery quite often, I always enjoyed the way the blue roof of the part already built became merged with the blue of the sky, observing how the colours changed according to the time of day. I was also taken with the red cube at the centre, which appeared, framed in my car\u2019s side windows, as I drove down the road towards the Po. The process of taking the photographs was extremely interesting, not so much because of the results eventually obtained, but because, strangely, in the perfect solitude of the public holidays when I could not disturb ongoing work or be hampered by it, it seemed that the secret of an approach to architecture and to the means of representing it photographically revealed itself to me. Paradoxically, the further my work proceeded, [\u2026] I found myself with more work to do. There were always new angles to observe and frame, new points of view for each little movement in space. Scarcely were perspectives photographed when they reappeared minutes later in a new way; the light constantly changed the sense and appearance of the volumes and surfaces, colouring them differently. The little windows of the low wing produced framings analogous to those of the camera\u2019s viewfinder. In their repeated square frames a succession of different things appeared, like an ever changing theatrical set [\u2026]. The rise to the ossuary confirmed this impression of mobility and flux. Immediately after climbing the first flight of stairs, where the exterior could be seen through cubical windows, I arrived at a point where two windows appeared simultaneously, one on the first and one on the second floor, with the green of a field visible through one, and the blue sky through the other. These two surfaces seemed to embody in a visible form, both organic and synthetic, the meaning of all this architecture, suggesting the idea of a balance between the internal and external.<\/p>\n And, reflecting on Rossi\u2019s architecture as a whole, Ghirri added:<\/p>\n every time I have encountered Aldo Rossi\u2019s work, whether as photographer or simply as observer, [\u2026] these buildings \u2013 whether stage set, cemetery, house, or school \u2013 amazed me [\u2026] because they were at once immediately familiar and yet mysterious: an extraordinary fusion of the rediscovered and the never before seen, of the known and the unknown. Perhaps Rossi\u2019s works achieve this miraculous balance between what we already know and expect of architecture, and the sense of bewilderment that is provoked by the new.<\/p>\n \u00a0[Luigi Ghirri, \u2018For Aldo Rossi\u2019 (1987), in P. Costantini (ed.), Luigi Ghirri \u2013 Aldo Rossi. <\/em>Things which are only themselves<\/em>, Montr\u00e9al\/Milan: CCA\/Electa, 1996, pp. 33-34 (translation modified).]<\/p>\n Finally, in a video interview taped in 1990, Ghirri added:<\/p>\n Beyond the architecture of Aldo Rossi, what struck me the most is his Scientific Autobiography<\/em> [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981], which I consider one of the most beautiful literary texts of the postwar period. It is a clear demonstration, even poetic in a way, of how architecture, photography, cinema, literature, are born from a crossing of desires, dreams, memories, intuitions and inventions. They never take shape as a static, designed, rigid thing, as an architecture or a photograph can be; they rather interpenetrate and find their privileged space within the existence of the author.<\/p>\n [Luigi Ghirri, video interview by L. Buelli, Modena 1990; in M. Mussini (ed.), Luigi Ghirri<\/em>, Milan: Federico Motta Editore, 2001, pp. 56-57 (my translation from the Italian).]<\/p>\n An empathy undoubtedly developed between Ghirri and Rossi; as the latter wrote in his Scientific Autobiography<\/em>, \u2018each place is remembered to the extent that it becomes a place of affection\u2019 \u2013 a statement that is very close to the way Ghirri related with landscape, urban and otherwise. In December 1995, Rossi wrote about the photographs of the San Cataldo cemetery:<\/p>\n Luigi Ghirri was from Modena and took photographs at different times of day; the great unfinished work [\u2026] affected him, too, because it belonged to the vast Po plain, the lower valley of the Po. The lower Po plain is scattered with abandoned farmhouses, and cemeteries, opera houses and dikes, which are like a great rampart against the force of the river. [\u2026] Luigi Ghirri knew all this, but he also had a sense for things that move across time; as in opera, a sustained \u2018feeling\u2019 both prefigures the climactic moments and keeps them alive \u2013 this is why he shunned the \u2018beautiful\u2019 photograph.<\/p>\n [Aldo Rossi, \u2018For Luigi Ghirri (Ghiffa, 7 December 1995)\u2019, in P. Costantini (ed.), Luigi Ghirri \u2013 Aldo Rossi. <\/em>Things which are only themselves<\/em>, Montr\u00e9al\/Milan: CCA\/Electa, 1996, p. 75 (translation modified).]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Luigi Ghirri installation images, Barbican Art Gallery, 25 Sept 2014 \u2013 11 Jan 2015, \u00a9 Chris Jackson \/ Getty Images On 11 December 2014, Jacopo Benci gave a gallery presentation of Ghirri\u2019s work included in the Barbican exhibition \u2018Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age\u2019 (25 September 2014\u201311 January 2015): I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,3,4,28,2,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ghirri-exhibitions","category-ghirri-exhibitions-luigi-ghirri","category-italian-landscape","category-italian-photography","category-leicester-conference","category-luigi-ghirri","category-spaceplacelandscape-studies","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":671,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions\/671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/luigighirri\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}