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POMERANZ COLLECTION

LUIGI GHIRRI

Lucerna
1971
From the series Kodachrome
Vintage print,
cm. 12.3 x 17.5
Inv. Nr. 188

Born in 1943 in Scandiano, Italy, died in 1992 in Italy
Lived and worked in Modena, Italy

Luigi Ghirri was an extraordinary photographer whose career was so rich and varied that it seems like a lesson in the contemporary history of the medium. Although well known in his native Italy, Ghirri does not yet have the international audience his work merits—perhaps because he died so young. Uncannily prescient, Ghirri shared the sensibility of what became known in the U.S. as the New Color and the New Topographics movements before they had even been named. Ghirri believed the local and the universal were inseparable, and that life's polarities—love and hate, present and past—were equally compelling. Not surprisingly, his interests encompassed all the arts: he worked in Giorgio Morandi's studio and with architect Aldo Rossi, while influencing a generation of photographers, including Olivo Barbieri and Martin Parr.
Parma and Lucerna’ titles pick up two cities’ name, Parma in Italy and Lucerne in Switzerland, and seem to underline two different wealth with a popular Italian landscape and a luxury Swiss showcase. But in spite of suggestive titles which seemed to talk about the whole city this pictures are only fragment of these cities’ life and wealth.