Luigi Ghirri

unique large-format Polaroid Polacolor print, signed, titled, dated, and with technical notations in ink in the margin, 1980

Germano Celant, William Eggleston, and Paola Ghirri, It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It. . .Luigi Ghirri (Aperture, 2008), p. 104 (this print, herein titled Amsterdam)

A variant of this image:

Luigi Ghirri: Polaroid (Milan, 2008), cover and p. 119

This print is in generally excellent condition, with no apparent fading or color loss. In high raking light, a few fingerprints are visible in the margins. The upper and lower print edges are unevenly trimmed, and there are tack holes in the margin corners. There is a ½-inch white label, numbered '1772' in ink, in the lower margin of the print.
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Inspired by images of the earth photographed by Apollo 11 in the summer of 1969, Italian draftsman and surveyor Luigi Ghirri began to plan a photographic project he described as 'the grand adventure of gaze and thought. . . the voyage into the inextricable hieroglyph of reality through PLANS and MAPS that are simultaneously PHOTOGRAPHS.'  The initial results were produced on weekends and during family vacations and presaged the works he would produce throughout his career:  they were in color ('I photograph in color because the real world is not in black and white.'), and he incorporated found objects—signs, posters, fragments, and the postcards he began collecting as a child—in their making to create conceptual images utilizing the real and the imaginary.

Ghirri's first published works were in Time-Life's Photography Year 1975 in the 'Discoveries' chapter, as well as those of fellow Modenese, Franco Fontana.  They were two of the five finalists selected from among 26 photographers by a panel of judges that included Helen Johnston,  Nathan Lyons, and Lorraine Monk. At the time of his selection, Ghirri was a member, along with Fontana, of Dimensione, a group of dedicated amateur photographers, founded by Il Diaframma gallery (Milan) director Lanfranco Colombo.

In 1980 and 1981, Manfred Heiting, director of Polaroid International, invited Ghirri to use the large-format 20 x 24 camera in the company's Amsterdam studio.  The results were a continuation of his Still-Life series of the mid-1970s, when he prowled the antique stalls in Modena, gathering a variety of objects, including manuscripts, old photographs, paintings, catalogues, prints, and three-dimensional objects such as toys.  The camera technician in Amsterdam offered Ghirri a catalogue of models from which other photographers had selected to create their Polacolor images, but the photographer chose to bring suitcases filled with his own found treasures.

During a 2005 interview with Melissa Harris, William Eggleston spoke about Ghirri's work,

'It is the variety of Luigi Ghirri's work, the eclectic aspect, that most surprises and excites me.  I cannot necessarily tell that they are all taken by the same person—which is a compliment!  With a Friedlander, you can always tell it's a Friedlander. . . and probably with an Eggleston, too.  With Ghirri, it's not simply the subject matter that distinguishes each of his series, it's the whole idea of the whole picture.  Everything.  His work is remarkably disparate, and there are moments—many—when it just hits.

'In general, I like Ghirri's use of color and the fact that the work feels empathetic . . . I like the play among reality and mystery, the constructed.  Everybody thinks this is new, but Ghirri was doing it more than thirty years ago.  And the photographs of maps . . . are so simple but exactly right.

'There's a lot that Ghirri did that I don't do, and that I probably won't do—but I'm sure glad he did it' (It's Beautiful here, isn't it . . .: Photographs by Luigi Ghirri, pp. 9-11 and 132-134).

No Polaroid Polacolor prints by Luigi Ghirri have been offered previously at auction.