This is an image called “Riva di Tures”, shot in 1977 by the late, great Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri and now on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, where they’re showing Ghirri’s entire “Kodachrome” series. Maybe it’s just a coincidence of date and place, but I always think of Ghirri as the Italo Calvino of photography: Like Calvino (at least in his “Difficult Loves” mode) Ghirri engages in very close observation of the everyday world, but always manages to find the surreal in it – but again like Calvino, the strangeness seems more profound and structural than merely freaky.
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