Uncommon and unpublished Luigi Ghirri images go on present in London

‘Luigi Ghirri: Felicità’ at Thomas Dane Gallery proposes happiness not as a situation to be attained, however as a manner of inhabiting the world by pictures. This will not be pleasure as spectacle or affirmation, however one thing quieter and extra exacting: the felicity of naming, noticing and holding issues in view with out exhausting them. Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, and unfolding throughout each of Thomas Dane’s Duke Street areas, the exhibition makes a persuasive case for Ghirri as one of the lucid thinkers of images’s perceptual limits – and certainly one of its most beneficiant practitioners.

The exhibition’s bodily break up will not be incidental. Moving between the 2 galleries seems like transferring between registers of wanting: from floor to area, from picture as object to picture as setting. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s curatorial contact is intentionally mild, permitting Ghirri’s inside logic to emerge by juxtaposition reasonably than didactic framing. What outcomes will not be a survey, however a fastidiously calibrated rhythm – one which mirrors Ghirri’s personal conception of images as an open, elastic system reasonably than a sequence of definitive statements.

(Image credit score: © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)

(Image credit score: © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)

The images that anchor the primary area are small, restrained, virtually stubbornly unassuming. Works comparable to Sassuolo, 1970 and the cluster of Modena pictures made between 1970 and 1973 seem to supply little or no at first look: fragments of partitions, signage, partial horizons, colors softened into chalky blues and muted reds. But this discount is exactly the purpose. Ghirri understood that trendy landscapes – notably the Italian countryside – had develop into visually exhausted, over-coded by clichés and nostalgia. Rather than trying to revive a misplaced pastoral ideally suited, he selected to work from inside this representational void.

These early images operate like a pared-down vocabulary of place. In Modena, 1971, a sign gestures beyond the frame, pointing nowhere in particular. In another Modena photograph, from 1972, a strip of sky presses against a flat plane of colour, collapsing depth into surface. The photographs refuse narrative resolution; instead, they ask the viewer to stay with the act of looking itself. Happiness, here, is not revelation but attention.

This emphasis on surfaces, maps and signs establishes a logic that carries into the second Duke Street space, where interiors and landscapes extend the same conceptual enquiry. Wallpapers photographed in the mid-1970s flatten rooms into graphic fields, turning domestic space into another kind of atlas. Walls behave like pages; photographs become images of images. The boundary between inner and outer worlds – so central to Ghirri’s thinking – begins to dissolve.

(Image credit: © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)

(Image credit: © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)

The later works bring this sensibility into the open air. In Capri, 1981 and Croce Bianca, Piacenza, 1984, colour becomes more luminous, but never expressive in a sentimental sense. The compositions are precise, almost architectural, holding the viewer at a measured distance. Landscapes from the late 1980s: Campagna Emiliana, 1985-89, Marina di Ravenna, 1986, are neither celebratory nor elegiac. They refuse the familiar drama of old versus new, rural versus industrial. Instead, they present a world shaped by coexistence, where distinctions have lost their visual productivity.

This curatorial decision to skirt Ghirri’s most iconic images in favour of quieter, less resolved works sharpens the exhibition’s thesis. ‘Felicità’ is not about reclaiming landscape or reasserting photography’s authority. It is about recalibrating the gaze. Ghirri believed photography should organise attention rather than overwhelm it – offering a pause within a world increasingly governed by speed, repetition and visual noise. His images do not seek to transform reality; they allow it to appear, lightly and with measure.

Seen today, Ghirri’s work feels less prophetic than necessary. In an image economy driven by excess and instant legibility, ‘Felicità’ argues for another mode of seeing: photography as a way of staying with things, of accepting their partiality, of recognising that meaning often resides in what remains unresolved. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s exhibition doesn’t present happiness as an outcome, but as a condition of looking – one grounded in silence, precision and the radical modesty of paying attention.

Luigi Ghirri: Felicità is at Thomas Dane Gallery from 23 January to 11 April 2026, thomasdanegallery.com

(Image credit score: © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)

(Image credit score: © The Estate of Luigi Ghirri. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and Los Angeles, and Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich and Madrid)