A rich program of events in Emilia celebrates Luigi Ghirri 30 years after his death

On the 30th anniversary of the death of Luigi Ghirri (Scandiano 1943 - Reggio Emilia 1992), one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, celebrations kick off through a rich program of events, including exhibitions, seminars and a publication, entitled Vedere Oltre (Seeing Beyond). A program that will run throughout 2022 in three cities (Reggio Emilia, Parma and Modena), promoted with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region and Apt Servizi Emilia-Romagna.

It starts with an itinerary of unseen exhibitions winding along the Via Emilia: Reggio Emilia is dedicating an exhibition to the photographic project realized by Ghirri in Rimini’s theme park, Italia in miniatura. The exhibition, titled On a Different Scale. Luigi Ghirri, Italia in miniatura and new perspectives, will be hosted in the Palazzo dei Musei. The city will also inaugurate the Ghirri Prize for Young Italian Photography as part of the Festival of European Photography. In Modena, on the other hand, an exhibition with photographic works by FMAV-Fondazione Modena Arti Visive will open, and finally Parma will present a calendar of meetings and study seminars, as well as a photography exhibition curated by the CSAC of the University of Parma. The tribute to Ghirri will also feature actor Stefano Accorsi, since 2020 testimonial of Emilia-Romagna, who will dedicate a video to the famous photographer from Scandiano, published soon on his social profiles.

Reggio Emilia: from Italia in miniatura to the Ghirri Prize.

The photography section of Palazzo dei Musei in Reggio Emilia remembers Luigi Ghirri with the exhibition In scala diversa. Luigi Ghirri, Italy in Miniature and New Perspectives, curated by Ilaria Campioli, Joan Fontcuberta, Matteo Guidi, produced in collaboration with Fototeca Biblioteca Panizzi, Luigi Ghirri Heirs Archive, ISIA Urbino. Open from April 29, 2022 to January 8, 2023, the exhibition brings together the photographs Ghirri took in the context of the Italia in miniatura theme park, conceived and designed by Ivo Rambaldi in the vicinity of Rimini, which opened in the summer of 1970. It is the very essence of the park that presumably led Ghirri to explore it on several occasions, from the late 1970s to the first half of the 1980s. On display are also unpublished photographs from the series In scala, in dialogue with a selection of materials from the park’s archive, produced by Ivo Rambaldi in those same years. In addition to maps, sketches, notes and other documents, photographs taken by Rambaldi while traveling around Italy stand out. Completing the exhibition are photographic projects made by a working group of emerging artists, catalyzed by Joan Fontcuberta and Matteo Guidi from a workshop at ISIA in Urbino. Also in Reggio Emilia, Ghirri will be the protagonist at the Chiostri di San Domenico of Giovane Fotografia Italiana, scheduled in conjunction with the Fotografia Europea Festival, April 29 to June 12, 2022. The ninth edition of the open call dedicated to the best artists of contemporary photography under 35 in Italy comes with an important novelty: the establishment of the Luigi Ghirri Prize, thanks to the collaboration with the Luigi Ghirri Heirs Archive. The prize will be awarded on the opening days of the festival to one of the seven artists, among Marcello Coslovi, Chiara Ernandes, Claudia Fuggetti, Caterina Morigi, Giulia Parlato, Riccardo Svelto, and Giulia Vanelli, selected by an international jury and on display in the Dominican complex. Finally, at the Cloisters of St. Peter’s, workshops and new photography projects are planned for fall 2022. The Municipality of Reggio Emilia will invite a number of artists to create new productions through workshops and ways of active participation of citizenship: the results will later be exhibited at the Chiostri di San Pietro.

Photographic works of the Visual Arts Foundation on display in Modena.

It was in Modena that Ghirri opened his first exhibition in 1972. Today the city is dedicating an exhibition to him that will run from Sept. 16 to Oct. 16, 2022 in the spaces of FMAV-Fondazione Modena Arti Visive in Palazzo Santa Margherita. Curated by Daniele De Luigi, the review starts with photographs in the collections managed by FMAV (the Photography Collection of the Civic Gallery Collection of the City of Modena and the Modena Foundation Collection). Photographs from the early period will be flanked by images and publications concerning Ghirri’s relationship with Modena’s conceptual artists. The series of Colazione sull’erba (Breakfast on the Grass), presented in the former Sip rooms in Piazza Grande in 1975, will be the starting point for exhibiting catalogs and documents that tell of his role as animator of activities on photography at the Galleria Civica, together with Oscar Goldoni. The exhibition will conclude with some landscape and architecture photographs from the 1980s, including those from the famous Versailles series.

Parma: between meetings, study days and an exhibition on landscape photography

Luigi Ghirri’s relationship with Parma, which began at the beginning of his career, was first and foremost a relationship with the University, with the CSAC founded by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, with Massimo Mussini, with the institution that had the great photographer as an interlocutor of excellence, not only for the donation of nearly two thousand prints that make the CSAC the largest collection of his vintage photographs. The city will host a series of meetings and public study days that will see scholars, artists, and writers reflect on Ghirri’s work and the great impact it had on culture, not only visual, of the second half of the 20th century. With the materials preserved in the CSAC archives, an exhibition will be set up and a volume published, to restore Luigi Ghirri’s intense and complex relationship with the University of Parma and with the generation of authors who, during the 1970s, defined with him a new landscape photography: the model of Walker Evans’ photography, the definition of a different approach to the history of photography, the authors of his generation who, between conceptual research and reflection on the media, invented a new way of seeing.

A rich program of events in Emilia celebrates Luigi Ghirri 30 years after his death

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