The reasons why some photographers achieve considerable renown and others remain ‘cult’ names are perhaps obvious enough, but the results are often unpredictable. It could be that the work is too specific, too much a product of its time and place to really resonate with later audiences, or maybe the market is simply not hospitable to it and such artists tend to fall between the cracks. While none of these conditions are really met by Luigi Ghirri, he nonetheless stubbornly remains very much a ‘photographer’s photographer’ and a relatively marginal one at that; his untimely death might have contributed to this status, though it doesn’t entirely account for it either. In that respect then, the current exhibition of his work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery is a welcome event that, among other things, will surely introduce a new audience this curiously self-effacing photographer. It is the first showing of Ghirri’s work in Ireland and consists of a number of vintage prints in his signature small format. As is typical of older colour prints they have aged in a somewhat idiosyncratic fashion, giving them a distinctly muted palette, one that actually reinforces our impression of the period in which they were made (despite how ‘new’ the work must have seemed at the time).
Ghirri was a pioneer of colour photography, but perhaps more importantly was also a pioneer in thinking about photography as a means of representation, examining how the world is shown and understood through pictures. As such, many of his photographs are actually pictures of other pictures where they are encountered in an urban context, the background noise of contemporary life. This attention to a nascent mass media and his astute understanding of the visual codes that make such images effective is key to understanding Ghirri’s work, which might otherwise appear somewhat inscrutable, or merely witty, which of course it is as well. This dry humour is a large part of Ghirri’s appeal and yet it is also the vehicle through which his rather serious-minded study of photography as a communicative medium was conducted. The selection of images here demonstrates his fascination with ‘types’ of pictures and he collects them in a fashion that if not exactly rigorous, is still very much part of a movement within advanced art photography during the 1970s to grapple with how photography works to create a particular understanding of the world in accordance with how it is seen photographically. So, while Ghirri’s modest and often quite casual photographs might seem an unlikely kind of semiotics, that’s exactly what they are.
While it is not directly signalled within the exhibition itself, the pictures that are most concerned with other pictures are grouped together and separated from those that exemplify the other main strand within Ghirri’s work, which are pictures that function in the same way as other types of picture, rather than featuring them as a subject. Most often, these appropriations take on a style only to subtly undermine it. The meta-photographic reflections featured in this exhibition are generally skewed takes on the commodified themes of mass tourism, a subject that is, of course, fundamentally connected to the advertising imagery that Ghirri tackled elsewhere. At the heart of this work is Ghirri’s prescient recognition of the fact that photography not only reproduces a subject, but also reproduces other pictures. He brings this fact to light by altering the transparency of the reproduction, such as in the case of a fog-shrouded, completely archetypal mountain that in his view of it is framed by a white motorway barrier and a bus lane, the very things that make the landscape accessible (that is, consumable). Strategies of this kind are typical in Ghirri’s work, noticeable also in his sly picture of the Colosseum, and show how advanced his thinking about the medium was, a fact also evidenced by his prolific writing.
Arguably, one of the factors that has hampered wider recognition of Ghirri’s work, despite his strong reputation among insiders, is the fact that it is too rarely seen in the context of a cohesive series or body of work. Whatever its strengths, this is not an impression the present exhibition corrects, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that such a clearly defined ‘project’ was not always part of Ghirri’s agenda and to make it so now would merely be a curatorial imposition. As has been noted, the loose thematic division in the work is astutely handled by grouping the ‘pictures of pictures’ and the ‘pictures about pictures’ separately, but unfortunately there is not enough context provided to untangle the visual codes that Ghirri is tackling – or even to get a sense that these ‘codes’ are his real target at all. The result is that his work can seem more like a series of poetic vignettes, studies in colour and mood, than an often sharply critical and far-sighted reflection on the medium itself. This issue aside, however, any chance to take a deeper look at Ghirri’s work and to broaden awareness of this pivotal, but elusive figure is bound to be significant. While his pictures do undoubtedly require a degree of close reading, the rewards they offer make it worth the effort.
– review by Darren Campion
