Luigi Ghirri, Atlante, 1998

The Atlante project by Luigi Ghirri is a photographic reading essay, of great value, made in 1973 on a geographical atlas, in whose illustrated pages the author has identified “the place where all the signs of the earth, from natural ones to built by man, they are represented: mountains, lakes, pyramids, oceans, cities, villages, stars, sun”. The system of signs adopted by an atlas is universally accepted and rests on conventions that do not admit any interpretative will, but Ghirri approaches it considering it as any other object of his daily experience and therefore considering himself free to read it as an image. The research method adopted is that of macro-photography, that is in the opposite direction to the blow-up technique. The author doesn’t give us an enlarged view of the same detail, he moves as if making a journey on the surface of the globe. As the author himself states on the sidelines of the project, “the only possible journey seems to be within the signs, the images: in the destruction of direct experience”.