Luigi Ghirri's 'Kodachrome'

Luigi Ghirri, Versailles, 1977, vintage cibachrome, 11 × 8 3/8”.

Luigi Ghirri was fascinated by the implications of the photograph’s two-dimensionality—its capacity for narrowness and opacity. None of the twenty-five vintage photographs shown here (all part of Ghirri’s self-published Kodachrome, 1978) contain much that could be called reportage, or even a “decisive moment.” Flatness is the focus. In Ile Rousse, 1976, a coastline dotted with sailboats is bisected by a wooden column streaked with shadows captive from another color space. This formal arrangement causes perspective to seem ambiguous, creating two foreign senses of a place—mundane and faintly surreal—that float over each other. Ghirri had a special ability to collapse the hierarchal distinction between subjects: As spatial relation dissolves, so does its perceived importance. Objects, people, and figures of light coexist in a space that lacks foreground or background, gently unseating the viewer’s sense that the photographs depict some actual space. The frequent appearance of pictures within his pictures—cardboard figures, painted logos, bits of postcards—deflates the distance between real and fake.

The press release describes Ghirri’s photos as “deadpan,” and “reflecting a dry wit”—but this can be misleading. It’s true that they are often wry, such as Egmond Am Zee, 1977 (from the complete series, not on view here), which shows a blue sky upstaged by a flag bearing the logo of Coca-Cola. But more often than not, his works are coolly disorienting—in Riva di Tures, 1977, a jet streak forms the top border of a pyramid defined by the two mountain peaks below it, with the enclosed sky’s outline implying another peak. But the show does end with a self-aware one-liner: Chartres, 1977, is divided between a window with a half-unspooled bamboo shade and a wall on which there is painted a 35-mm canister partly pulled out, which reads FILM.