La Vita è Bella Color Photography by Luigi Ghirri

La Vita è Bella ...

Svizzera, 1971-73
All works by Luigi Ghirri.

If you admire William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, or Martin Parr for their seminal contributions to the art of color photography, then you must also acquaint yourself with the work of Luigi Ghirri. Ghirri died in 1992, at the age of 49; his vision has since been well-celebrated and documented in Europe, but he’s virtually unknown to the rest of the world. That’s a shame, because his early poetic explorations of his native Reggio Emilia and the places he studied in and visited, like Modena, Bologna, Capri, Venice, and Paris, as well as his later, more structured projects on architecture and the Italian countryside are gloriously infused at once with wit, buoyancy, and a stealthy seriousness. But we can stop worrying, because we now finally have the first comprehensive Ghirri collection, published this summer by Aperture: It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It… is a gorgeous, well-curated, and long-overdue tribute to an influential shaper of the modern photographic sensibility.

Capri, 1981