Parma pays homage to Luigi Ghirri with a major retrospective, on the 30th anniversary of his death

From Dec. 17, 2022 to Feb. 26, 2023, the Palazzo del Governatore in Parma is hosting, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Luigi Ghirri’s death, the exhibition Labyrinths of Vision. Luigi Ghirri 1991, curated by Paolo Barbaro and Claudia Cavatorta. Organized by the City of Parma in collaboration with CSAC - Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma and Archivio Eredi Luigi Ghirri, the exhibition is part of the calendar of events of the Vedere Oltre (Seeing Beyond) project promoted by the cities of Reggio Emilia, Modena and Parma, to which the master of Italian photography was very close, with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region and APT Servizi Emilia-Romagna.

The exhibition stems from the photographs that Ghirri left to the CSAC on the occasion of the publication of the volume Viaggio dentro un antico labirinto (Journey inside an Ancient Labyrinth), created with Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and published in 1991. 153 photographs taken by Ghirri to set up the mockup of the book will form the core of the exhibition: the prints were a tool to design the layout and to impose the typographic rendering of the images, but above all a tool for dialogue with Quintavalle to write the text.

The photographs related to the book, displayed respecting the chapters of that work, will be in dialogue with other images. Flanking the central corpus of the exhibition will also be a selection of Ghirri’s shots taken from the 1970s series (from Colazione sull’erba, Paesaggi di cartone, Kodachrome), from documents of the relationship between the photographer and theartist Franco Guerzoni, from historical photographs of the Italian landscape chosen by Ghirri and given to the CSAC, from the large-format Polaroids, spectacular one-offs that in 1981 testified to the juncture taking place in the photographer’s work between post-Dada avant-garde and the resumption of a reflection on the view.

The aim of the exhibition is to recall how Ghirri’s relationship with Parma was articulated and fruitful, offering the author himself models with which to compare: Ghirri followed the initiatives of the University of Parma, finding confirmation to his reflection on the image in the American photos of the Farm Security Administration (exhibited at the Sala delle Scuderie in 1975) and in New Photography USA (Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank exhibited in 1972) as in the images of the Italian landscape by Bruno Stefani (CSAC exhibition in 1977). Finally, Ghirri contributed to the increase of the CSAC’s historical collections by procuring nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century photographs for the University’s archives.

In all, therefore, more than two hundred images, all from the collections of the CSAC’s Photography Section, will be on public display. They will present visitors with paths through Luigi Ghirri’s work and the models he identified in and out of his own production: in addition to his photographs, also images he loved or that were the occasion of his reflections, such as the documentary ones by Dorothea Lange, by Walker Evans, those that pursued the beauty of the landscape by the Fratelli Alinari, by Carlo Naya, those that redefined the perception of that landscape in a post-Bauhaus key by Bruno Stefani.

The exhibition will be enriched by a wide calendar of collateral events, including photography workshops for children and in-depth meetings open to the public that will see scholars and experts reflect on Ghirri’s work and the great impact it had on culture, not only visual, of the second half of the 20th century. The first event is scheduled for Saturday, December 17, at 5 p.m. at Cinema d’Azeglio, in the presence of director Matteo Parisini with the screening of his new film entitled Infinito - The Universe of Luigi Ghirri, a documentary on Ghirri’s personal and professional journey that had its national premiere at the Rome Film Festival.

Hours: Wednesday through Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. December 24 and 31 open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, December 25 and January 1.

Free admission.

Image: The Civic Library, Santa Maria di Sala, Padua, 1988. Photo Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy of Eredi Luigi Ghirri.

Parma pays homage to Luigi Ghirri with a major retrospective, on the 30th anniversary of his death

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