It’s hard to know what Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino’s tribute to the artist actually is
Published to accompany an exhibition of Ghirri’s work, curated by the authors – fashion photographer and artist Bolzoni, and film director and interior/exhibition designer Guadagnino (the two have collaborated previously: Bolzoni shot promotional stills for Challengers, the latter’s Zendaya-led tennis-love-triangle story from 2024) at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, Felicità features 45 previously unseen colour photographs by the artist, presented as two portfolios. The first, preceded by a short and illuminating text that Ghirri (who died in 1992, before reaching fifty) published in Les Cahiers de la Photographie in 1985, opens with a scrap of magazine print disintegrating into the pavement, in which the only legible word is ‘Felicità’: happiness, with a hint of luck.
According to the works list, this is ‘Modena, 1971’. It is the first of several similar works: scraps of paper with type or image framed centrally against concrete or marble, appearing somewhere between found and arranged. These relics – a film stub, a raffle ticket – and the pocked surfaces on which each rests, are presented on equal terms: the detail of one directs the eye to the detail of the other. Then the lens shifts to vertical surfaces – brickwork, the layered remnants of fly posting, mirrors in austere interiors – and gradually eases the path to legibility, before pointing skywards and towards abstraction. The second portfolio punches through into larger spaces, admits people, expands vistas and moves beyond Modena and through the 1980s, to Bologna, Campogalliano, Marina di Ravenna (per the works list).
Ghirri writes in the Cahiers text (Felicità has two other brief writings by the artist) that he conceives of his entire oeuvre as an ‘open work’, a mosaic in which ‘the image is completed only at the end’, from an accumulation of autonomous images. He adds, amid tributes to Jorge Luis Borges, Walker Evans and Bob Dylan, that this work is in ‘a continuous dialogue between what has already occurred and what is still to come’. Here Bolzoni and Guadagnino have seemingly paid their own homage, contributing to Ghirri’s mosaic through the selection of tiles and texts the photographer left behind, though in a rather vague manner, with neither introduction nor further indication about the purpose of the project; just their names on the cover.
Luigi Ghirri: Felicità by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino. Mack, £50 (hardcover)
