Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992) was an Italian photographer and prolific essayist. His photographs were known for their examination of the way in which photography, and art in general, is essentially a staged medium. His images have a sense of theatricality, self-awareness, and yet at the same time the items and scenes he chooses to present are so often mundane. Below I have written up an essay of his that I feel deals with the considerations I often grapple with as I pass through places, and I pay a closer attention to the more humdrum aspects of the scenery around me. Like Ghirri, I have found that looking at things I see every day, but closer, makes the ordinary unfamiliar.
When travelling by train, I have always been amused by the gap between the landscape visible from the carriage windows, and the photographs placed inside the train compartments depicting the usual sites - the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Romanesque Cathedrals, Renaissance cities, mountains, lakes and pines along the coastline.
The journey is thus twofold: there is one to be seen from the window and another to be seen in the train compartment. Perhaps it was on the basis of this observation that I called this journey of mine through Italy Italia ailati. I tried to document both an image of a journey from the train window, and the juxtaposing images displayed within the compartment. The result was a kind of sandwich of images: the official, ever-present Italy, alongside the other one, blurred by speed, as if it were of little importance. We might often find a synthesis of these two contrasting scenes in the world around us; the battlements of a tower attests to the glories of the past, and the swallows still fly above them, but they cannot conceal the concrete fencing framed against a blue sky.
My aim is not to offer testimony to everyday banalities, or to pick out the kitsch; rather, I'm driven by the desire to know, to decipher, and to bring together these two contrasting views in order to discover something about their affinities and differences. While the past may be symbolised by a miniature trinket of the Urbino Palazzo, or a row of Davids in a Rome shop window, it's important to remember that many things are not 'For Sale', and the market is not omnipresent on the outskirts of the city, or the hills around it.
In this series, which comprises some 200 photographs, I set out to examine a landscape that, as a consequence of the overlapping objects, histories and ideas, often seems completely foreign to me. Or perhaps it is so familiar that I can't read it - there are too many person memories folded into its terrain, recollections that stop me from seeing clearly and deciphering the landscape.
Aspects of the real are grafted into the ruins of the past - witnesses to their own theatricality. And these elements, that history has left out, seem to pop up like hallucinations or eccentric symbols. Yet in this scene , with all its coincidences and disconnections, we might make out elements of our own identity.
Many have read these images as 'everyday banalities', or as an interest in the kitsch, but I am interested in neither. I'm not interested in extrapolating objects from the endless catalogue of the kitsch, to which so many objects have already been relegated - the victims of exclusionary mechanisms and disdain. In my mind 'everyday banalities' are only seen as part of an uncritical gaze - an attitude which defers to the past, worshipping only its codified 'truths'. Thus, the kitsch is not the object represented, but the act of relegating an object uncritically to the ghetto of the undignified - seen as just another attraction in the freak show.
I have chosen to photograph objects described as kitsch, for within them we might often glimpse a set of important contradictions: the mismatch between the copy and the real thing, or between the past and the desire for its image in the present. After all, if we trace the etymology of the word, its early meaning relates to a variation of scale, duplication, the non-real, the identical repetition, the ideology of the analogy... So might we not also classify all photography as inevitably kitsch?
The present work is also part of a project on 'territorial identity' which, in my opinion, cannot be put into practice without addressing the terms adopted. It is only by seeing these terms in the past, in the structures of our cities, in our landscapes, in the images around us, and by relating them to the present, that we might be able to identify, verify, unmask, and then design 'a landscape'.
Luigi Ghirri, Milan 1979
When travelling by train, I have always been amused by the gap between the landscape visible from the carriage windows, and the photographs placed inside the train compartments depicting the usual sites - the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Romanesque Cathedrals, Renaissance cities, mountains, lakes and pines along the coastline.
The journey is thus twofold: there is one to be seen from the window and another to be seen in the train compartment. Perhaps it was on the basis of this observation that I called this journey of mine through Italy Italia ailati. I tried to document both an image of a journey from the train window, and the juxtaposing images displayed within the compartment. The result was a kind of sandwich of images: the official, ever-present Italy, alongside the other one, blurred by speed, as if it were of little importance. We might often find a synthesis of these two contrasting scenes in the world around us; the battlements of a tower attests to the glories of the past, and the swallows still fly above them, but they cannot conceal the concrete fencing framed against a blue sky.
My aim is not to offer testimony to everyday banalities, or to pick out the kitsch; rather, I'm driven by the desire to know, to decipher, and to bring together these two contrasting views in order to discover something about their affinities and differences. While the past may be symbolised by a miniature trinket of the Urbino Palazzo, or a row of Davids in a Rome shop window, it's important to remember that many things are not 'For Sale', and the market is not omnipresent on the outskirts of the city, or the hills around it.
In this series, which comprises some 200 photographs, I set out to examine a landscape that, as a consequence of the overlapping objects, histories and ideas, often seems completely foreign to me. Or perhaps it is so familiar that I can't read it - there are too many person memories folded into its terrain, recollections that stop me from seeing clearly and deciphering the landscape.
Aspects of the real are grafted into the ruins of the past - witnesses to their own theatricality. And these elements, that history has left out, seem to pop up like hallucinations or eccentric symbols. Yet in this scene , with all its coincidences and disconnections, we might make out elements of our own identity.
Many have read these images as 'everyday banalities', or as an interest in the kitsch, but I am interested in neither. I'm not interested in extrapolating objects from the endless catalogue of the kitsch, to which so many objects have already been relegated - the victims of exclusionary mechanisms and disdain. In my mind 'everyday banalities' are only seen as part of an uncritical gaze - an attitude which defers to the past, worshipping only its codified 'truths'. Thus, the kitsch is not the object represented, but the act of relegating an object uncritically to the ghetto of the undignified - seen as just another attraction in the freak show.
I have chosen to photograph objects described as kitsch, for within them we might often glimpse a set of important contradictions: the mismatch between the copy and the real thing, or between the past and the desire for its image in the present. After all, if we trace the etymology of the word, its early meaning relates to a variation of scale, duplication, the non-real, the identical repetition, the ideology of the analogy... So might we not also classify all photography as inevitably kitsch?
The present work is also part of a project on 'territorial identity' which, in my opinion, cannot be put into practice without addressing the terms adopted. It is only by seeing these terms in the past, in the structures of our cities, in our landscapes, in the images around us, and by relating them to the present, that we might be able to identify, verify, unmask, and then design 'a landscape'.
Luigi Ghirri, Milan 1979
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