Viaggi, edited by James Lingwood

Viaggi

Photographs by Luigi Ghirri

Edited by James Lingwood

Mack and Masi Lugano, 2024

 Ghirri?  Viaggi?  If you have not heard of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri or don’t know that “viaggi” means “travels,” consider yourself lucky because you can now travel for the first time in a territory of mysterious realism, the more subtle photographic equivalent of literary magical realism.  “The map is not the territory,” the philosopher Korzybski said.  In almost every image in the 178-page Viaggi, Ghirri reminds viewers of Korzybski’s truth and attempts to reclaim with original compositions the territory from its received representations and traditional associations.

Ghirri died in 1992 at the age of 49, but the editor of Viaggi, James Lingwood, has an excellent understanding of Ghirri’s reterritorialization.  The first image in the book is an old map obscured with dark splotches that look like clouds.  The next image is of a postcard rack filled, mostly, with grand mountain scenes, territory as wild.  Then a photograph of a tourist taking a snapshot of people against the background of just such a mountain, but already we can see Ghirri demythologizing grandiose scale because about half the image is taken up by a blank beach and almost blank sky.  Three pages later is an image of a mountain that appears to be a reflection seen through a screen of numerous brick-sized frames.  For Ghirri--who knew the work of that master of internal frames Lee Friedlander--how the territory was framed was always crucial.  Soon we have a photo taken from the back of four women gazing at mountain ranges… but they exist in a blown-up photograph of a map. 

This prefatory section of Viaggi is unusual—but appropriate—because it is a via negativa, an introduction to the conventions Ghirri was working against in the photographs after the preface, images that suggest the territory is not something always large and distant and dramatic but also small and near by and humble if one chooses to see as Ghirri does.  Perhaps one could claim that Ghirri is even deconstructing the somewhat bureaucratic word “territory” which had its origin in the older Latin word “terra,” meaning earth or land.

The next section of 28 pages begins with a few tourist mountains but soon shifts to the seaside where Ghirri can explore a favorite theme of “empty” territory: wide beaches, calm open seas, and high skies.  No people, maybe a few objects for scale.  Here are land and sea when no one (except the photographer) is looking.  My favorite is a frame within the photo’s frame, a simple soccer goal through which one views only sea and sky.       

Like mountains and seashores, ancient cultural sites attract travelers, but Ghirri usually shoots the sites from long or odd angles, minimizing or obscuring historical significance by including within his frame unexpected features of contemporary territory. Here humble nature takes up about three fourths of the photograph, and the human doesn’t seem to be looking at the ruin:

Grand modern buildings, associated with mountains, are shot with “proper” respect—the whole building in the frame--until Ghirri starts making fun of them by reducing their scale, the Eiffel Tower, for example, reduced to a six-inch souvenir.  Right in the middle of the book is a set of photographs of partial and puzzling maps—in case viewers were in doubt about Ghirri’s de-mapping project or, at least, the editor’s presentation of that project in Viaggi. 

Ghirri used the phrase “sentimental geography” to describe tourist imagery.  Some of his photographs may seem soft and sentimental until one recognizes the wit in his composing.  Ghirri’s photographs are not all deconstructive and rarely do they bray or joke like, say, Martin Parr’s tourist-site photos.  Ghirri is a gentle satirist who exposes his “targets” in ever-so-slightly over-exposed images.  Ghirri’s territory is full of light and pastels and is marked by occasional glimpses of the minimal sublime, an alternative to the maximal sublime of snow-covered peaks.  Here is one example:

When people appear in Ghirri’s photographs, they are usually small, even miniatures in contrast to the scene, another way for him to suggest that the territory is everywhere and anywhere—notions that can be suggested only if the photographer refuses most viewers’ expectations of seeing “themselves” or their human cousins in photographs.  Almost all of the travelers in Viaggi are shot from the back, Ghirri more interested in what and how they are viewing than the individuals.  This choice, like many other Ghirri compositional techniques, adds to his mysterious realism, a double seeing: the subject’s and the photographer’s.

Maps have words on their surfaces, and at the end of Viaggi the editor includes some photographs of books against which photographs lean, as if Ghirri were reminding viewers that one image is worth thousands or even millions of words, those arbitrary signs far abstracted from the territory.  One of his more amusing images also undermines language.  Though not on the approved media list supplied by the publisher, the photograph can be seen online here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/magazine/luigi-ghirris-brilliant-photographic-puzzles.html

Mare, Italian for sea, cannot adequately express or frame the sea and sky and that strip of land on the right.  Not only that but for the English reader the word meaning “female horse” has nothing to do with the scene.  Consider, too, the proportions of what is depicted; the sign takes up about a third of the space, the sky about half, the sea what is left.  Just like the fence fails to frame the sea, the word fails to frame everything.

Despite Ghirri’s suspicion of language, he published many highly literate essays about photography, and they are often the bases of the three interpretive texts that follow the photographs in this book.  Developed from a current exhibition in Lugano, Viaggi also includes a biographical outline, places and dates of the images, and a bibliography.  Before Ghirri’s death, most of his photographs were published in Italy and with Italian texts, reasons you may not be familiar with his work.

The photographer and critic Teju Cole has said he looks at Ghirri’s work daily.  Scholars describe his growing influence on contemporary color photography, but no current photographer I know has Ghirri’s textures, his ghostly colors and shades (a synonym for ghosts).  Ghirri’s analog photographs are mysterious now because they don’t seem to attempt the kind of saturated clarity one finds everywhere in digital images.  In a way, Ghirri’s unique signature may eventually be seen as an historical curiosity, Italian sepia. Perhaps the most instructive analogues of Ghirri’s work are the paintings of vases and jugs by the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi whom Ghirri knew.  Both their territories are obsessive but also well-lighted and quiet.  In a dark and clamorous time, the photographs in Viaggi—sometimes witty, sometimes beautiful, always thoughtful, never careless even when imitating snapshots—should give the slow-seeing viewers Ghirri wanted hours of pleasure.

[The two photographs republished here are courtesy of MACK and the artist.]

Tom LeClair is a widely published literary critic who has recently turned to reviewing photobooks for Open Letters Review.