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Surveying Modern Europe
John Haberin New York City
Luigi Ghirri and Ruth Rosengarten
I have trouble picturing a young Luigi Ghirri as a land surveyor. The profession calls up expanses even now yielding their secrets—and only now opening to human settlement. His Europe may be stiflingly familiar territory or, in leaping across time, disarmingly expansive. It appears as downright impossible territory, without a touch of digital manipulation.
His photographs themselves are thoroughly inhabited, but by whom? A return show opens with a vintage photograph of a mother and child. Fingers hold it and a sleeve, to recover once and for all its memories and its meaning—like Ruth Rosengarten in treasuring a family history. Only who are they? Ghirri cannot say, for they are not his memories. They are, though, part of his own photograph, and they are now yours or mine. 
Photography inside-out
What is left of the Italian coastline after the weekend crowds out for a tan and, of course, a Coca-Cola sign? What is left of that narrow sliver of water, hemmed in by the equal blankness of the sky, concrete walls, and sand less like a beach than an empty lot? For Luigi Ghirri, even rough stones settle beneath a jet stream, ambiguously a wall or a force of nature. Ghirri shares a gallery's Chelsea spaces with little-known photographs by Ellsworth Kelly. Not surprisingly, they look very much like Kelly's paintings, in everything from a barn door to city sidewalk. No other painter saw abstraction as so literally an abstracting away, whereas Ghirri surveys a land in which the mark of humanity or the artist refuses to go away.
Not that the living is easy. Another bather finds herself on a narrow railing high in the Alps, with the mountains closing in on both sides. Their jagged peaks resemble the back of a billboard in another image, its icy blue taking over the sky and its outlines like an abandoned cathedral. A window frame, a lock at its center, barely keeps out a city under construction, reduced somehow to black and white. Ghirri plays again with foreground color and found imagery for the neon blue of a chain-link fence in front of a vast hall, perhaps the very one that Orson Welles used for The Trial. Who can say whether its seemingly endless typing pool is locked in or out?
Then, too, a land surveyor takes the earth's measure. Starting in 1970, Ghirri saw instead "a tangle of monuments, lights, thoughts, objects, moments." He saw them, too, as "analogies from our landscape of the mind, which we seek out, even unconsciously, every time we look out a window." More of the quote supplies the title for the thirty-five photographs in "The Impossible Landscape." One sunlit building is only its reflection in a puddle, but if you cannot figure out which one, never mind. You sought out the analogy and the tangle.
Ghirri's subject is the banality of everyday life, touched by leaps of the imagination. It looks less than composed and yet thoroughly implausible. He might have snapped away at random as he traveled from Italy to Austria and France, only to find that the scenes had shifted without his knowing it by the time he got home. One photo collage takes the same building from multiple angles, so that a tree seems to march across a balcony and window, while another leaves uncertain whether one is looking at tiling or pixels. Nothing has the scope or specificity of America for Robert Frank, Mark Steinmetz, or Lee Friedlander, which makes sense—and not only because Europe is more settled territory. To return to the quote, that "impossible landscape, without scale, without a geographic order to orient us" is not nature or culture, but photography.
Plainly one of its tools is rephotography, and another is color. Ghirri combines them with an advertisement for Canon, the girl behind the camera face to face with you. Her smile dissolves in a blur of light, whether from her flash or his. Like Jan Groover, he helped claim color photography for art, as part of what a 2007 show called "Colour Before Color." Only where Groover saw the beauty of tableware, or the "the photographic object," he looks past objects to their settings. And then he turns the settings inside-out.
Ghirri often brings the outside in or the inside out. Posters peeling from a wall look instead like women peering or revealing themselves from behind. The Colosseum appears just past planted trees, like part of a backyard. A woman enjoys the company of leaves slipping in from a window, while a couple in bed appears to have landed out of doors. What might pass for the very same couple then ends up the scrap of a snapshot on the street. Ghirri, who died of a heart attack in 1992, at only forty-nine, might almost have ended there, too.
Whose memories?
Surely the fingers in his latest show are his, and so is the care he takes, but not for a Ghirri family history. He pictures a found object, and whatever meaning it has for him is his construction. His photograph of a photograph has the sepia tone of the original, and he calls it a still life. He is constructing memories every step of the way, in what the curator, Matt Connors, calls "The Art of Building." Then, too, he has no choice, because the original memories are now lost. The vintage print once spoke not just of maternal affection, but of a family, only its name is now forgotten, and the father has become little more than a ghost.
The mother is stiff at best. Is that in accord with her personality or her proper role, and what of the man? Has she erased him from her life, or is he haunting her? Could Ghirri have effaced him, with a trick exposure or in Photoshop? But no, he merely placed a scrim over him before snapping the picture, although one can easily mistake it and other works for photocollage. Art like this gains in meaning because it lives, as Jacques Derrida liked to say back then, "under erasure."
Ghirri could not have used Photoshop anyhow, for he made his print in 1979. The digital has a way of pulling things into the present, but his work has multiple presents. It exists in the time of his sepia-toned subject, his time, and today—but not only those. Other photos preserve an industrial sector that was already passing—and with another trick, color. A factory tram car is bright red, and what might be a planetarium has taken on wild colors, as part of Il Paese dei Balocchi, or country of toys. A traditional still life, as in the golden age of Dutch painting and Dutch drawings, does not include human attributes like fingers, but Ghirri cannot resist playing around.
The factory interior belongs to a third series, apart from still lifes and toyland—Paesaggio Italiano, or Italian landscape. You will not be surprised to learn that these landscapes take him indoors. Not that I can swear for two prints that approach abstraction. One might be of dirt on the ground, as for Henry Rothman, or rain on a window. Another has a slit right down the middle, like painting at the time by Lucio Fontana in Italy. Sepia tones and color models are painterly, too, but also a photographer's stage play.
Ghirri has a love of stages. He pictures a theater as an empty arena and a recording studio as an ungainly mass of equipment. He visits a Renaissance palace for its frescoes, but walls rise out of nowhere, and stairs descend just as abruptly. He keeps staging things as well, with paintings leaning where they do not belong. Which is not to say that their frames will not match the architecture. Once again, creation has multiple histories.
One photograph shows a sunset pinned in front of another sunset, and it is hard to say which is a painting and which a photo. His best trickery, though, is the plain act of preservation. He photographs a library and a record sleeve, just as he collected vintage photo albums. His best, too, situate found images in fully human spaces, from reflections in a car window to paintings surrounding an old poster bed. Who knows which is older, the art or the furniture? Who knows, too, which is more up to date?
A woman's loves
With "Dear Fusia," Ruth Rosengarten recovers a woman's private thoughts and half-forgotten loves. Yet the faces behind them emerge only slowly. At least they do in the gallery, where Rosengarten displays letters to her mother. To add to the gesture of publicity, she has enlarged them so that anyone can read and look around the edges. Look longer, though, and old photos peek out from behind the handwriting and weathered paper. They appear as little more than ghosts, like memories barely accessible to the mind.
It was not like that for Rosengarten herself. In going through her mother's private possessions, she must have encountered letters and snapshots on an equal footing, along with goodness knows what else. Like a proper mystery novel, they must have come, too, with shocks along the way. Who knows all the characters in a parent's life, going back to before marriage, and who even wants to find out? What kind of woman preserves them all anyway, like Walker Evans collecting picture postcards, rather than commit them to the trash? One speaks of a scrapbook with good reason.
Caring for it all would have posed a special challenge to this woman—and a special need. Born to Russian Jews who had every reason to flee, her story crosses several continents and changing identities. Fusia was just one of her nicknames. As a child in Shanghai, then a British possession, she learned English, although she heard mostly Russian at home. She later lived in South Africa and Tel Aviv, with their own secular Jewish cultures. The letters are all in English, language alone providing a sense of continuity, although some bear official stamps in Chinese and Hebrew.
I would not be surprised if Rosengarten has added them to her photo collage, borrowing from other documents. They convey a progressive layering, along with the snapshots and the actual prints, which do not reach to the edge of a sheet. Not that the narrative is any easier to pin down, despite their frankness and each writer's care to include the date. One has only a line or two in each, with room only for shows of affection and humor. Someone from the 1940s signs a note "Hitler," in quotes. Rosengarten may not want a resolution—not when the story reaches to her in England and the present.
Laetitia Soulier, too, offers a family history, with a sense of home and a recognition that she may never quite fit in. At least she appears in one of her photographs and, I imagine, her children in others. If none of them fit, it is only reasonable, because home here is a dollhouse. Or rather, a dollhouse is only one of several homes, all of them well furnished and none of them accommodating. Near the gallery desk, she deposits a desk of ordinary size in a curved style out of "progressive" tastes from at least fifty years past, but it holds several tiny rooms of its own, each meticulously modeled. Behind it, bright red wallpaper covers a wall with its several scales, from floor to ceiling and from details to patterns.
All these turn up in her photos, their format wide enough that anyone might belong. One child lies half within a model like a giant, in a room lined with still smaller boxes and multiple versions of the same green wallpaper, big and small. Others lean and step over the top of several rooms, while models behind a fourth almost make perfect sense as real space in perspective. Still other models never do appear in prints, perhaps because they contain only wood scraps from their own construction. The show's title, "Fractal Architectures," attests to a dizzying logic that Soulier pretty much undermines—not least by allowing everyone a rest. In her self-portrait working in pencil on what might become the scene itself, even her dress picks up the surrounding patterns, but the only way into her thoughts is by a spiral staircase and a timepiece small enough to fit in the cabinet.
Luigi Ghirri and Ellsworth Kelly ran at Matthew Marks through April 30, 2016, Ghirri alone through December 19, 2020. Ruth Rosengarten ran at Rooster through March 12, 2016, Laetitia Soulier at Claire Oliver through April 9.