Luigi Ghirri

(5 January 1943 – 1992) was an Italian photographer. Born in Scandiano, Ghirri began taking photographs in 1970, mostly working in a milieu of conceptual artists. From 1983 he focussed primarily on photographing architecture and the Italian landscape. 

Luigi Ghirri was an extraordinary photographer, as well as a writer and curator whose career was so rich and varied that it seems like a lesson in the contemporary history of the medium. Although well-known in his native Italy, Ghirri does not yet have the international audience his work merits--perhaps because he died so young. "It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It"--the first book published on Ghirri in the U.S.--will establish him as the seminal artist he was. Uncannily prescient, Ghirri shared the sensibility of what became known in the U.S. as the New Color and the New Topographics movements before they had even been named. Like his counterparts in Italian cinema, Ghirri believed that the local and the universal were inseparable, and that life's polarities--love and hate, present and past--were equally compelling. Not surprisingly, his interests encompassed all the arts: he worked in Giorgio Morandi's studio and with architect Aldo Rossi, while influencing a generation of photographers, including Olivo Barbieri and Martin Parr. 

" The meaning that i am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things and life." -1978 Luigi Ghirri