A few years ago, Luigi Ghirri’s small, profound photographs began stopping art fair-goers in their tracks. The artist and curator’s mostly-polaroid images, resembling instagrams in excelsis, felt at once like a Mediterranean equivalent to the work of Stephen Shore or William Eggleston – electric moments lassoed on the hoof – but also had a conceptual heft: tourists gaze not at epic landscapes but mural-size reproductions of them; architecture is dynamited while a pedestrian walks idly by. An art of looking, of looking at looking, and now of a tricky nostalgia, Ghirri’s gorgeous and smart photography makes one wonder not at its revival two decades after his death but that the renascence took so long.
Originally published in the March 2013 issue. Luigi Ghirri: Kodachrome is at Matthew Marks, 526 W 22 Street, New York, to 20 April. .
