Luigi GhirriAtlante

In this book the undisputed Italian master of contemporary photography gives a photographic reading of an atlas. With this work Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) located "the place where all the signs of the earth, from the natural to the cultural ones, are conventionally represented : mountains, lakes, pyramids, oceans, cities, villages, stars, islands". Grouped together in a system of universally accepted conventional signs, Ghirri considered these geographical signs to be trantamount to other every-day objects and in this way read as images. His method was to use macro photography : he doesn't give us a blown-up image of the detail but rather takes a trip on the surface of a globe affirming that "the only possible journey now seems to be within the sphere of signs and images ; that is, in the destruction of direct experience." Atlante is a key investigation of the Seventies and it preceded the photographic experience of his landscape photos of the Eighties, which distinguished the artistic research of Ghirri and the photographers who reestablished Italian photography.