Luigi Ghirri photographs a glossy blue sheet of crumpled paper decorated with stars. It is understood these little shapes with five points are stars, though I’ve never seen a star in the sky look so, with five little points. The paper catches irregular shards of light reflecting off every crease and fold, as singular as sunlight cast across rocks and hills. This is what a Luigi Ghirri image can do: show sight in its mysterious tangle of two and three dimensions, muddled scales, and unsure recognitions. I was never able to draw a star that looked as satisfying as the ones in schoolbooks. Images are learned and remembered as much as they are seen.
Ghirri’s Felicitá spans Thomas Dane Gallery’s two Duke Street spaces. The ground-floor gallery opens with a photographic sequence of torn magazines, newspapers, a flyer for a Laurel and Hardy show unsure what to do with its bygone dates as it flits along the pavement, stuck with the world. A subsequent sequence of photographs reveal layers of posters peeling at organic intervals. Fragments of advert captions, dates, and faces wet with ripples of underlying glue, sealing the paper into crevices of brickwall mortar.
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Ghirri even takes photographs of photographs, as with what appears to be a galaxy of stars, perhaps from the pages of a stargazing book or a movie poster. The image takes up the frame so as to give it no border, no confirmation of where the image might end and its context begin; it takes time to recognise the ribboned shift from in-focus to out-of-focus, hinting at a papery surface. One interior shot shows a door and a wardrobe looking as flat as the spread of an evenly weighted open book, no matter the truth of their angles. Another shows a closed door with lines so clean even the keyhole offers no promise of anything opening soon.
In the introduction to his photobook Kodachrome, Ghirri includes many knotty ideas about ‘the destruction of direct experience’, images and reality, labyrinths, ‘the walls of which are ever more illusory’, yet out of which ‘it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to finally determine the precise identity of man, things and life, from the image of man, things and life’. Elsewhere, he claims the ‘real world’ is precisely this ‘photomontage’ of images. It’s interesting, if a little ambitious and dialectically confused. But that’s okay, I don’t need dialectic certainty to have a good time, and anyway, photography isn’t discursive like language, it doesn’t have its conceptual riggings. Photography has a privileged view on perception precisely because it sits between the deliberative space of selection, and the seemingly instant technical capture that registers sights beyond what was thought to have been seen.
Thomas Dane Gallery’s second exhibition space is more domestic in its surroundings, with steps, a corridor, and two partitioned rooms. Here, Ghirri’s photographs seem more conceptually unmoored, not least because people enter the frame. A head caught in a mid-turn blur, filling up at a petrol station. A small, oddly shaped railing, a promontory, a woman looking out at the ocean. Colour. Pale and blue. A group at a lake, in unsure anticipation. Empty plastic chairs and people walking by. Pools of neon light, and, in one photo, two classical statues and a red telephone box at the entryway to a house, at the side of the road. It makes me think of garden centres: a maze of Buddhas, Venus de Milos, fountains, tropical fish, Christmas trees, all bundled together, worldly travellers lost at an unlikely pitstop.
Then there’s a photo of a waiting room and three people. A man rests paper against his case so he can write. Another sits cross-legged, not quite unaware of the camera. A woman rests her head on her hand, and in that moment, identity, image, and reality are no longer in question: cast in light-and-soft-lit relief life’s rituals and routines, life’s remnant strangenesses.
A reflection is only recognised as such on turning and seeing what is reflected. Until then, the reflection is the real and only thing. Ghirri’s photos play with just this rhythm of learning and unlearning recognition, quietly taking time in both.
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Luigi Ghirri (b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Roncocesi, Italy) began his work as an artist in the early 1970s in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where he would spend the rest of his working life. In 1978, he published Kodachrome, a pivotal book that encapsulates the diverse themes that would go on to define his career. Recent solo exhibitions include: Luigi Ghirri. Polaroid ’79–’83, Museo Pecci, Prato, Italy (2025–26, forthcoming); Luigi Ghirri: Il viaggio. Photographs 1970-1991, MASI Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland (2024); Luigi Ghirri: The Map and the Territory, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, travelled to: Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2018–2019); The Landscape of Architecture, La Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy (2018); Pensare per immagini, MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy (2013); and Project Prints, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2012). In 2011 and 2013, Ghirri’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale.
Ghirri’s work will also be included in Atlante, a group exhibition curated by James Lingwood at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, 3 February–5 May 2026.
Phil Tarrant is a writer based in the UK.
