Luigi Ghirri and a vampire movie

Things have been slow here b/c I was knocked flat down by the flu for nearly a week.  Just shook the last remnants.  Getting back to it.

So, to begin, last night I went to the Aperture Gallery for an opening for Luigi Ghirri, an Italian photographer who worked in color, sort of along the lines of Eggleston and Parr, or even Shore and his likes, but Ghirri’s work has a succinct surreal and meta-fictional-layered-realities-thing going on that really pulls you in and spins you around.  I was rubbing my eyes like I was in a house of mirrors.  A few people commented on how this surrealism was specifically European – and I agreed that an American couldn’t have done it so effortlessly and authentically, not without heavy irony (or tackiness), maybe this is b/c Europe’s heritage lies in all the old ideas of painting, while America’s photographic sensibility lies in Realism…


photo: “Rimimi,” 1985, from Paesaggio Italiano.  ©Luigi Ghirri.


photo: “Rome,” 1979, from Diaframma.
©Luigi Ghirri.

After that we headed to a film, Let the Right One In; well, it’s literally a Swedish vampire movie, but I thought it was much more of a love story.  Really really worth finding and seeing.  There’s an American remake coming out soon, but how anyone could possibly remake this…I mean even the Swedish language seems perfect for the film.  One of the better films I’ve seen in awhile.


video: clip from Let the Right One In

(Update: I went back and specified above “America’s photographic sensibility”, adding photographic, b/c I wasn’t clear to begin with that I’m talking specifically photography. Sparked b/c I had a long winded discussion with a friend who argued about my suggesting that there was different sensibilities in different cultures/countries, as I recently made a similar comment in a post on Japanese photogaphy.  They seemed to take it as sort of jab at their patriotism, which is not what I meant at all…admittingly, I don’t often do an excellent job of speaking my mind and keeping my foot out of my mouth, but I’ll stand by this comment…even though generalizations are meant to be over a beer at the bar top b/c exceptions are always rife.  In this case, after I told my friend I was talking only photography, they simply said, Dusseldorf school and Germany.  …Point taken.  But still, look at Ghirri’s book.  Then look at Eggleston’s (they’re compared and Eggleston writes the forward to Ghirri’s book).  It’s like speaking Italian and then speaking colloquial-american-english.  What do you think out there in internets land?)

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