Luigi Ghirri and the Art of Seeing

August 27, 2026

Luigi Ghirri and the Art of Seeing

We first sensed it while exploring the metaphysical landscapes of Emilia through the work of Aldo Rossi and Gae Aulenti: some images portray a place, while others transform the way we see it. Luigi Ghirri belongs to the latter. From the 1970s onwards, the photographer turned his lens on an Italy far removed from the grandeur of monuments and the familiar language of the postcard. He photographed provincial roads, shop signs, gardens, gates, windows, off-season beaches and urban fringes. Ordinary places, in the most literal sense of the term, which through his gaze revealed a complexity that had until then remained almost invisible. Suspended atmospheres, at once metaphysical and deeply grounded in the physical world, became his signature. People appear only rarely, unless they are the explicit subject of a portrait. More often, they exist as figures printed on a surface, while plants and animals can become the only forms of life within the frame.

It is precisely this Emilia – capable of reshaping the rhythms of everyday life – that Ghirri carried within him. Born in Scandiano in 1943 and trained as a surveyor, coming to photography in the early 1970s, within just a few years he had developed a visual language that was instantly recognisable. At a time when black and white was still considered the defining language of authorial photography, he worked almost exclusively in colour, documenting landscapes in transformation while inviting viewers to look more closely, recognising relationships and details that usually pass unnoticed.

Landscape, understood in its broadest sense and made up of both visible and invisible elements, became the focus of his research. For Ghirri, it was the outcome of an ongoing dialogue between history, architecture, infrastructure and human presence – something that can only be shaped over time. Today, that vision feels more relevant than ever, at a moment when travel so often risks becoming the pursuit of images we have already seen. In Viaggio in Italia, the landmark 1984 publishing project developed with Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati, Ghirri brought together some of Italy’s leading photographers to portray the country through its most everyday landscapes. The book marked a cultural turning point: it did not simply suggest where to look, but proposed an entirely different way of experiencing places.

Paradoxically, this visual language, seemingly devoid of people, could only emerge through Ghirri’s constant exchange with them. Throughout his career, he cultivated relationships with some of the central figures of Italian and international culture, from Gianni Celati and Antonio Tabucchi to Lucio Dalla and the band CCCP, for whom he produced both their most revealing portraits and the cover of their final album. Above all, he forged a profound dialogue with architects, foremost among them Aldo Rossi, who encouraged him to turn his attention to the landscape itself. And with architecture, Ghirri established the same kind of relationship that defines his photography: one rooted in listening to context, in the ability to evoke what lies beyond the frame. Whether photographing the objects installed at the Triennale or a hortus conclusus enveloped in vegetation somewhere unknown, his images, as Giorgio Panattoni wrote, “anticipate the very moment of our seeing them, as though there had never been a first encounter, but as if we had always been waiting for them, as though they had always been there for us, revealing the way we already look at the world”.