|
|
But a truly new chapter of Italian photography first began with Ghirri. As the title of his book Kodachrome (published in 1978) signalized, his world is no longer black, white, and gray. Parallel to Americans like Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, who primarily turned to landscape, Ghirri also worked in color. In Atlante (1973), one of his earliest series, the exploration of conceptual art also becomes clear: Ghirri photographed details from atlases -as departure points for imaginary journeys. In a country that has been photographed to excess, he began at a kind of point zero, from where he developed his own images of Italy. While they are poetic, they are also a clear counter-proposal to the nostalgic and documentary stereotypes. An eye for the random and peripheral characterizes Ghirri's unbelievably dense everyday scenes, interiors, and landscapes. He took these photographs for the most part in his native landscape, the province of Emilia-Romagna in the north of the country. Here, in the small city of Fidenza, he also photographed the nighttime street scenes in the Deutsche Bank Collection.
|
