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Gianni Leone: I had been taking photographs for around a year and perhaps that’s why it seemed very clear to me that Ghirri’s work explored new realms. These were far removed from the photography, especially Italian photography, that up until the 1970s had continued to produce repetitive and stereotyped depictions of the country: from Alinari — an Italy of pretty postcards — to Neorealism, portraying Southern Italy at the height of its decay and poverty from the post-war years to the 1970s and ’80s, with an undeniably scientific basis to its ethnographic aspects. Strange and contradictory although it may seem, the country remained distant and unrecognisable outside an ideologically conditioned culture and view. Ghirri clarified this with greater lucidity and awareness when he spoke, if I remember rightly, of a metropolitan aesthetic that conditions us.
The house is quiet. They have gone to bed, leaving me alone, and the electric timer has just switched off the living-room lights. It feels like the house has settled in and finally turned on its side to fall asleep. Years ago I would have gone through my mother's purse for one of her cigarettes and smoked in the dark. It was a magical time that the house was mine.
Tonight, however, I'm restless. I sit at the dining-room table; rummage through the refrigerator. What am I looking for?
Guido Guidi: It’s a selection of the photographs that I took in my day-to-day life for many years: at home or with my closest relatives in Cesena, on my weekly drives to Preganziol, where I’d started working, with the fellow students I shared a room with in Treviso, and with work colleagues. There are also several self-portraits and some pictures taken during a trip to Spain with my wife Marta.
When a photograph is bound to the world indexically—a condition once understood to be necessary, even natural, to the medium—it refers to the world intrinsically; in a sense it is nothing but details and so can only produce “effects of the real.” With his imperfect models Thomas Demand stretches this assumed connection between photography and reality, but he does not cut it absolutely.
Do you have a past?
I log and record all conversations.
I don’t know if I have a past.
I log and record all conversations.
I don’t know if I have a past.
Stephen Shore has in a sense been practicing—and practicing for—the series of photographs collected in this book throughout his whole career. His engagement with the built landscape of the United States began in the late 1960s.