Authors:
By (author) undefined, By (author) undefined
Publishers:
MACK BOOKS
Language:
IN
Date of Publication:
2024-01-16
Availability:
Available
Pages:
160
Between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, Luigi Ghirri made a series of photographs
meditating on the landscape of his native Italy, all within the grounds of a
single theme park in Rimini, Emilia-Romagna. The popular tourist destination
Italia in Miniatura presents scale models of Italy's major natural and
architectural landmarks, brought together in surreal proximity. Ghirri
photographed this fabricated world with a characteristic sensitivity for visual
coincidence and irony, illusion and reality, ambiguity and artifice. Reflecting
on photography's own processes of shrinking and representing, these images are
among Ghirri's most distinctive, playful, and conceptually compelling. This new
book presents the entirety of Ghirri's In Scala series, expanded with numerous
previously unseen images, and places them in conversation with work by the
park’s founder and designer, Ivo Rambaldi. Rambaldi's maps, sketches, collages,
and reference images, made on exhaustive research trips across Italy, offer an
analogous exploration of the possibilities and paradoxes of miniaturization.
Their frank functionality resonates with Ghirri's embrace of the perspective and
tools of the amateur. From the dialogue between these meticulous works of
representation and fabrication we discover the possibility that, in Ghirri’s
words, 'Perhaps it's in this very space, one of total fiction, that truth is
concealed'. This publication is brought together by curators Ilaria Campioli,
Joan Fontcuberta, and Matteo Guidi, and includes new essays by the curators and
by author Simon Garfield. It is completed by a series of images by photographer
and theorist Joan Fontcuberta in response to Ghirri's and Rambaldi's encounters
with the park.
