The Education of a Photographer by Steven Heller Charles Traub

Author:Steven Heller, Charles Traub
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth Press / Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. (Perseus)

LUIGI GHIRRI

Luigi Ghirri/Charles H. Traub, from Statement/A Remembrance

Since his death, Ghirri has been recognized as a giant of post twentieth-century European photography. How he got there is best understood in his own words, which the editor includes with his own appreciation.

The little man on the brink of the ravine.

Ever since childhood, the photographs I like best have been the ones of landscapes, which I used to find interspersed with the maps in Atlases. I was particularly fascinated by those inevitable photographs in which a little man appeared, immobile, dwarfed by the Niagara Falls, by mountains, rocks, very tall trees, majestic palms, or on the brink of a ravine.

I would find this little fellow in postcards depicting more or less famous squares, perched on historical monuments, lost among the ruins of the Roman Forum, or gazing up at the tower of Pisa.

This little man was in a state of continual contemplation of the world, and his presence lent a particular fascination to the pictures. Not only did he serve as a unit of measure for the wonders depicted, but this human unit of measure gave me back a sense of space; I saw him in this way and I believed that it was possible to understand the world and space through this little man.

I also liked the idea that the photographer was never alone in these spaces, but always had a friend or acquaintance at hand, who would travel the world with the photographer to discover and to represent it. I never managed to look one in the face, to give him an identity; the little fellow remained unknown, yet he accompanied me in the most fascinating and unfamiliar places, places which he observed, contemplated and measured.

Later on, when I started to take pictures myself, I went on looking at pictures of landscapes, but I couldn’t find him any longer. Stupendous scenes, back-drops, increasingly deserted and incomprehensible spaces succeeded one another, broke up into pieces, multiplied in an increasingly dizzied fashion. But it all looked inhabitable to me, or rather the places had been dissipated; all that remained were magnificent back-drops in black and white or Technicolor; the little man had disappeared. He had gone away, taking with him the representation of places and leaving their simulacrum.

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