Strand.Luzzara – Luigi Ghirri / Hazel Kingsbury Strand

71 reproductions from prints by Hazel Kingsbury Strand, re-photographed by Luigi Ghirri and rearranged here with the collaboration of a then young curator and scholar Paolo Costantini (1959-1997).
The story is quite simple. In the spring of 1953 the Strand couple – Paul, the great American photographer, leading the way in favour of photorealism, and Hazel Kingsbury Strand, a photographer of great intuition, come to portray Luzzara, in the low plains around Reggio Emilia. His images are larger, her images are smaller. Luzzara is the birthplace of Cesare Zavattini, a brilliant man of cinema, literature and much more, as well as the person who prompted this project. He will later write a brilliant and melancholic text that the renown imprint Einaudi will turn, bringing together images and text, into the book ‘Un Paese’. A milestone in the history of photobooks, so important that we are not able, in only a few words here, to say for how many reasons, or which. Nevertheless, we try to summarise quoting Ghirri’s words in today’s volume: ‘What is certain is that both (Strand and Zavattini), seem to be in a state of grace, touched by the miraculous gift of simplicity that binds like a thread all the elements that make up this saga of the Po Valley, thus transforming it into a kind of sweet song of the earth, with moving and universal tones’.
This simplicity can also be seen in the layout of the book, turning it into a great example of photo-story, an elementary narrative model that the authors redeem, giving it a previously unknown dignity and poetry.