Kodachrome, the Ghirri's revolution

by Paolo Valassi

​​In 1978 Luigi Ghirri published his first book with the publishing house Punto e Virgola, founded by him together with his wife Paola and Giovanni Chiaramonte. 
Kodachrome, this is the title, has become a cult book, unobtainable except among collectors and reaching prices of over a thousand euros per copy. Today, exactly twenty years after Ghirri’s death, the English publishing house (!) MACK has published the second edition. 
This new edition of Kodachrome is a facsimile of the original, adopts the same design, the same text layout and the same sequence of images but uses a new scan of Ghirri’s original films in order to exploit modern printing technologies. Also included is a handy handout containing a short essay by Francesco Zanot that analyses the impact that Kodachrome had on the history of photography. An impact, let’s say right away, disruptive. For many reasons.

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​​“I have sought in the gesture of looking the first step to try to understand. [...] From the need and desire to interpret and translate the sign and the meaning of this sum of hieroglyphics that is reality, my work is born. [...] The meaning that I try to give to my work is to verify how it is still possible to desire and face the path of knowledge to be able to distinguish the precise identity of man, of things, of life, from the image of man, of things, of life.”

For Ghirri, photography is an education to the gaze aimed at the signs of the world and aimed at giving a meaning to what is in front of us. Meaning that will not be eternal, stable, because we change, the world changes and also the meanings change. If this is the philosophy of the Master, from a practical point of view all this translates into some basic principles. 

The first is the rejection of a single, binding, visual canon of reading the world that, if adopted, would prevent us from seeing reality according to our own memory, our own thoughts, our own sensitivity. 
“I think that many values ​​are not readable within precise codes. I believe that within the photographic image, and in particular in my work, other images flow together: cinematographic, literary, musical, pictorial, etc.”

The second principle, a direct consequence of the previous one, is the rejection of the distinction between “low” and “high” images, between “beautiful” and “ugly”. Ghirri photographs insignificant shop windows, fruit vending machines, ashtrays, waiting rooms, Italy in miniature… that is, things that according to a certain common photographic taste, especially amateur, he should never have photographed. But if one wants to decipher and make sense of the hieroglyphics of the world, one cannot allow oneself to distinguish between “beautiful” and “ugly”.

​The third principle concerns the aphasia of the gaze. Ghirri, as well as being a great photographer, left us many writings and therefore it is always worth using his words: 
“I believe that one of the weaknesses of photography is the self-limitation of expressive possibilities. In any film, for example, there is a succession of different moments where it rains, where the light is more beautiful, where the light is ugly, where the light is interesting, where the light is not interesting. A continuous change, in short. The whole range of expressive and narrative possibilities are explored. In photography, however, the reduction of the possibilities of optimal representation becomes a form of aphasia of the gaze. My desire has always been to work without limitations, at 360°”. 
In photography, the codes, the visual mental habits limit our shooting possibilities to the moments in which the light is perfect. If we want to tell and interpret the world, it is not necessary for the light to be optimal. There is no beautiful light and an ugly one, a sad one and a happy one. Light is equated to an object. 

The fourth principle concerns “clues”. In a work begun in 1976 entitled Identikit, Ghirri photographed himself, but, instead of making his self-portrait, he photographed his apartment in Modena, the shelves of his library, his record collection sometimes hidden by small objects such as a globe, a postcard, a wooden drawing set square. The same operation was done years later with the work on the painter Giorgio Morandi. Morandi was already dead and unable to make a direct portrait, Ghirri took up the artist’s studio to highlight his personality through the spaces and small things. A sort of indirect portrait. Ghirri demonstrated that photography can also be a way of looking at reality through clues. That is, he interpreted objects as signs and these signs give the sense of something else, in this case the identikit, his or Morandi’s. 

The fifth principle is summed up by this sentence: “Only a narrative structure can give order to the excess of meaning produced by signs that can reveal themselves as wrecks”. 
For Ghirri, working with photographs means carrying out an editing job similar to that carried out by a film director. The project is important, not the single image. He doesn’t care if one image was taken in the 70s and another in the 90s: he associates them anyway. And speaking of projects, Ghirri has always preferred to publish his work through books, not through exhibitions, because only in books is it possible to create a cinematic rhythm.

​All these “Ghirrian” principles translate, from a technical point of view, into very specific choices regarding the way of framing, the film used and the use of lenses. Ghirri almost always uses normal or medium telephoto lenses, never wide angles, and has never used daring shooting points, like Rodchenko, so to speak: this is to make the image correspond as much as possible to the usual gaze. After all, it would be a contradiction to want to distort and modify reality when you want to understand and decipher it.
Another common characteristic of his photographs is the fact that they are very little contrasted. The colors are not strong but deliberately soft, faint, washed out. Ghirri uses color negative films, not slides. Also in this case his aim was to have the greatest possible adherence to reality. There must be no forcing with respect to the tonal gap of reality.
Kodachrome contains everything we have talked about: the photographic series, the temporal stratification, the reference to something else, the definition of the meaning determined by the context, the beauty of the banal.
But also something else: Luigi Ghirri loved to repeat that the world was no longer known through direct visual experience, but through its photographic reproduction. Kodachrome is (was, its production ceased in 2009) a positive film, with low sensitivity and very high resolution, renowned for its chromatic saturation. 
But above all, it is a symbol of mass photography. Ghirri moves within this culture, reinventing it:
“I am not interested in: images and “decisive” moments, the study or analysis of language as an end in itself, aesthetics, the all-encompassing concept or idea, the poet’s emotion, the cultured quotation, the search for a new aesthetic creed, the use of a style. My commitment is to see clearly […] to be able to see and make the hieroglyphics encountered recognizable”.

Luigi Ghirri – Kodachrome, London, Mack, 2012 (+ booklet with English, French and German translation)