Niente di antico sotto il sole. Scritti e immagini per un’autobiografia – Luigi Ghirri

‘I have always considered photography to be a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding, modifying reality. I let its magic reveal to our eyes the spaces and objects I want to represent. I am confident that a gaze free from formal lucubration can find a balance between awareness and simplicity. No violence, no visual-emotional shock, no forcing, but silence, lightness and rigor to be able to establish a relationship with objects and places”.
Luigi Ghirri

‘There is nothing else so ancient under the sun’, wrote Jorge Luis Borge in his poem Happiness. When that verse reached Luigi Ghirri, it had already happened that light taught him to renew the soul of objects. “It seems to me that this sentence can contain many of the meanings and motivations that have always accompanied my work,” he wrote.
Yet again: “Too much of everything, in this endless commonplace”, referring to the excess of memory that saturates Italian places and dulls the gaze.

If Ghirri’s photography has the quality of a dream, his writing is a body with a soul, and ‘Niente di antico sotto il sole’ contains both.