Nothing old under the sun: Gianni Leone on Luigi Ghirri's 'Puglia

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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. Rosalba Branà: What was the
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