The Idea of Building by Matt Connors

To me, as a painter, the photographs of Luigi Ghirri are built rather than composed, things rather than images. The Italian phrase for taking a photo, fare una foto, literally means “to make a photo,” and this feels like some kind of key. Trained as a land surveyor and a draftsman, Ghirri perceived the world — and all of reality — as a terrain, an assembly of signs, symbols, and images, including other photographs. Taking all of this as his raw material, he re-assembled and re-deployed it, reading the physical world but also writing it.

This feel for making, this obsession with building(s), resulted in photographs (unique, modestly scaled prints, often glued to board immediately after printing) that sit in the world as objects, as new things — as constructions. This was a radical proposition in an era when so many photographers saw their medium as purely descriptive.

Ghirri’s works can also seem built out of and into each other, his idea-building moving in a recursive loop rather than simply forward. Careful groupings turn out to be so porous and interdependent that many photographs could fit into more than one category. Ghirri was the son of a carpenter, and his modes of making and thinking were replete with folders, tables, containers, passe-partouts, books, portfolios, boxes, and shelves. The resulting photographs followed suit, their form and content often mirroring, containing, or confusing each other. In Modena, 1979, a close-up of a pair of hands (the artist’s own? a found image?) assembling the physical components of a daguerreotype, Ghirri reveals an image as a material construction, caught in the process of its own making. In Bitonto, 1990, a sort of mise en abyme of builtness, he depicts a temporary wooden stage built into, or maybe grafted onto, a grand theater’s proscenium: image as staged stage.

Ghirri was closely aligned with the Conceptual art practices of his time, but his process of rematerialization presents a different path, a counterpoint to his peers’ strategies of dematerialization, though still aimed squarely at reframing the lived-in world. In his photographs — with their repeated and layered conjurings of built structure, supports and surfaces interacting and swapping places, textiles confounding image with surface, landscapes rhyming with architecture, and music and speech made visible — the immaterial is materialized.

From the Archivio Luigi Ghirri, Reggio Emilia:

exhibition announcement, 1979 — One of the announcement cards Ghirri assembled by hand for his 1979 exhibition in Paris.

Ghirri was intrigued by antique photo albums with illustrated mats. In this album he placed his photograph in the mats, highlighting his uncanny sense of juxtaposition.

Prime Pitture, 1970s — Much of Ghirri’s writing is devoted to the idea that a picture is not a mirror reflecting the real world but rather a visual device built by an artist or a photographer. *Prime pitture* is a children’s book from his archives. The title means “first paintings,” and it offers simple drawings on gridded paper for children to replicate with colored pencils and a ruler.

Ceramiche Marazzi catalogue, 1983 — Parallel to his art, Ghirri made commercial work for some of Italy’s most distinguished brands. Ceramiche Marazzi, a Modena-based manufacturer of ceramic tiles, commissioned Ghirri to make photographs for its 1983 catalogue. Discussing the cover image, he described his intent to create “a space which, instead of being the physical and measurable space of a room, embodied the notion of mental space in a given moment.” Elsewhere in the catalogue he photographed two brightly colored tiles with the *Prime pitture* activity booklet, its gridded pages echoing the tiled walls on the catalogue cover.

drawing by Paola Borgonzoni Ghirri for the cover of — Ghirri’s wife, Paola, made this drawing in the style of the *Primi pitture* book. It was reproduced on the cover of his landmark 1978 photobook *Kodachrome*.