Corrado Benigni, Viaggiatori ai margini del paesaggio. Ghirri, Barbieri, Basilico, Chiaramonte, Cresci, Guidi, Jodice, 2024

In 1984 Viaggio in Italia appeared, the collective photographic project conceived by Luigi Ghirri that revolutionized the way of representing the Italian landscape: for the first time, photographers chose to leave the historic centers of cities. Their attention shifts to the margins, to the peripheries, and what until then was not considered worthy of an artistic gaze because it was disharmonious, eccentric, becomes instead the recurring subject of a new way of narrating our country. The landscape is no longer just the background against which human events unfold, no longer just a “theme,” but the lens through which to look. Forty years later, this volume traces, in one grand narrative, seven paths within that experience, through the work of some of the most representative authors – Ghirri, Barbieri, Basilico, Chiaramonte, Cresci, Guidi and Jodice – who opened unprecedented paths for subsequent generations of photographers and artists. Interweaving the artistic paths of each author, and having as a common thread the experience of Viaggio in Italia and their connection with Luigi Ghirri, Corrado Benigni reconstructs, with precise writing, the genesis of that project and the seminal importance it had for the following decades. For the first time, photography chose to step out of its own boundaries to dialogue with other forms of expression (literature, cinema, architecture, graphics), opening up to the world as never before: a revolution that reaches down to us, to the visual culture in which we are immersed.

“I think photography is a formidable visual language to be able to increase this desire for the infinite that is in each of us.” – Luigi Ghirri