The Idea of Building

Pre-Echo Press, 2021. Hardcover, 92pp., 15 x 12.25 inches

New

Based on the exhibition The Idea of Building held at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York in October 2020 and now published in an edition of only 500 copies by Pre-Echo Press, this book features some of the Luigi Ghirri’s most iconic photographs alongside previously unseen works selected by the artist Matt Connors from the Archivio Luigi Ghirri in Reggio Emilia. “To me, as a painter, the photographs of Luigi Ghirri are built rather than composed, things rather than images. The Italian phrase for taking a photo, fare una foto, literally means “to make a photo,” and this feels like some kind of key. Trained as a land surveyor and a draftsman, Ghirri perceived the world — and all of reality — as a terrain, an assembly of signs, symbols, and images, including other photographs. Taking all of this as his raw material, he re-assembled and re-deployed it, reading the physical world but also writing it."