Luigi GhirriLuigi Ghirri was a much admired Italian photographer, writer, curator, and mentor. Born in Scandiano (Reggio Emilia), Italy, he later studied and worked in Modena. He exhibited widely in Italy and throughout Europe, with solo shows in Geneva, Amsterdm, Arles, and Cologne, as well as at the Light Gallery, New York. His work is in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; and Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. His approximately twenty-year career was so rich and so varied that it seems like a lesson in the contemporary history of the medium. He was uncannily prescient at times: a brilliant colorist with a marvelous sense of humor, irony, and poetry, he explored many areas important to photographers working today. In particular, he shared the sensibility of what later became known as "The New Color" and "The New Topographics" movements before they had even been named. And, although it wasn't until later that he came to know the work of William Eggleston (one of the photographers he most admired, along with Lee Friedlander and Walker Evans), they were sharing common ground as early as 1971. Ghirri sought a language for seeing and describing the everyday landscape freshly and unromantically, without cliché. Like his counterparts in Italian cinema (Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio de Sica), he believed that the local and the universal were inseparable, and that life's intrinsic polarities--love and hate, present and past--were equally compelling. Ghirri's interests encompassed all the arts. He worked, for example, in Giorgio Morandi's studio and with the architect Aldo Rossi, while influencing a younger generation of photographers, including Olivo Barbieri, Martin Parr, and many others. Read More Read Less