THE MAP and the territory

Jeu de Paume, Paris
2019

This first retrospective of photographs taken outside his native Italy by Luigi Ghirri (1943- 1992) focuses on the 1970s. It covers a decade in which Luigi Ghirri produced a corpus of colour photographs unparalleled in Europe at that time.

Luigi Ghirri, who was a trained surveyor, began taking photographs at weekends in the early 1970s, devising projects and themes as he roamed up and down the streets, the piazzas and the suburbs of Modena. He cast an attentive and affectionate eye on the signs of the outside world, observing, without openly commenting on them, the changes wrought by humans to the landscape and the housing in the Reggio Emilia, his province of birth. It was a barometer for a local vernacular exposed to the advent of new forms of housing, leisure and advertising. “I am interested in ephemeral architecture, in the provincial world, in objects generally regarded as bad taste, as kitsch, but which have never been that for me, in objects charged with desires, dreams, collective memories [...], windows, mirrors, stars, palm trees, atlases, globes, books, museums and human beings seen through images.”