Introduction
Luigi Ghirri photographed Paris from 1970 to 1980. At the same time, his compatriot Erri De Luca was a worker there. They did not cross paths. We present an unpublished text by the writer in the form of a letter and the photographic series by Luigi Ghirri. This is the dialogue they could have had with each other.
Erri De Luca
For me, photographs are associated with family albums. My father produced about twenty of them with photos made with the most basic cameras, first a Ferrania, a fixed-aperture camera, and then an Instamatic.
When I visit photography exhibits, the look on my face is that of someone who is leafing through private images. Who are these people? Where are they? What day is it?
In those pages, the human figures are intruders in a geometry. None of them are necessary, every one of them is passing by. Others before them have traveled through that field and disappeared from it.
Photography prescribes an encounter between one who carries a camera around their neck and one who is the object of attention. Between them exists an un-even exchange: one is focused; the other distracted, unaware.
Only in fashion photos where the subject strikes a pose do they correspond.
Framing for me always prompts this question: what stayed outside the frame? The same happens to me with paintings.
In Ghirri’s case, I forget it. Framing delimits the space, but I don’t resent that. I am attracted to the center, to a convergence. Here occurs the encounter of the force of impact on a target.
I came to know Paris as a resident. I lived there in the years when Ghirri frequented it. I was a construction worker then, roaming around in the city on the seventh day.
In these images, I see an atmosphere of those solitary Sundays when the body took a break from the sledgehammer, hands in pocket for not knowing where else to keep them.
I found myself again. I passed by there, too, lost in a book that I had held crumpled in my pocket, walking slowly along some boulevard.
At thirty, one is all confusion and rage, at least I was. I felt as though I were wearing the clothes
of a season that was mild on the outside and cold on the inside.
My own solitude blended with others’; it contained no nostalgia; it looked for no horoscope to foretell a future. I lived inside a state of mind, not at an address of some place and some storm.
Around me was Paris, a city that paid my salary in francs, at the time the magic currency of all immigrants begging for work in France. Along with tiredness, the shifts ended with eruptions of misunderstandings that come from pride.
Thanks go to Ghirri for having taken me for a stroll in a city of the past from where I sent letters with lies so no one would know.
Perhaps we crossed paths, you, Mr. Ghirri,
and I, ignored and having walked out of the frame at the moment the shutter clicked. I left no traces; neither did others who were stopped in your view-
finder.
Your predatory eyes grab a moment of uncertainty, turning us into figures.
Your soft colors help dissolve our bodies, making them emerge like shadows from the developer in a darkroom. We were for you apparitions on photographic paper. I turn to you with these few lines, from the beyond where I continued.
I do not have a single photograph of those days in Paris. I see yours, and it seems as if I am becoming the owner of the missing pages in my album.
Credits
Erri De Luca, Album, 2022
© 2023, Erri De Luca
All rights reserved
Traduit en français par Danièle Valin
Translated into English by Myriam Ruthenberg