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Italia in Miniatura

By (author) Luigi Ghirri

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Between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, Luigi Ghirri made a series of photographs meditating on the landscape of his native Italy, all within the grounds of a single theme park in Rimini, Emilia-Romagna. The popular tourist destination Italia in Miniatura presents scale models of Italyâ€™s major natural and architectural landmarks, brought together in surreal proximity. Ghirri photographed this fabricated world with a characteristic sensitivity for visual coincidence and irony, illusion and reality, ambiguity and artifice. Reflecting on photographyâ€™s own processes of shrinking and representing, these images are among Ghirriâ€™s most distinctive, playful, and conceptually compelling. This new book presents the entirety of Ghirriâ€™sÂ In ScalaÂ series, expanded with numerous previously unseen images, and places them in conversation with work by the parkâ€™s founder and designer, Ivo Rambaldi. Rambaldiâ€™s maps, sketches, collages, and reference images, made on exhaustive research trips across Italy, offer an analogous exploration of the possibilities and paradoxes of miniaturisation. Their frank functionality resonates with Ghirriâ€™s embrace of the perspective and tools of the ama-teur. From the dialogue between these meticulous works of representation and fabrication we discover the possibility that, in Ghirriâ€™s words, â€˜Perhaps itâ€™s in this very space, one of total fiction, that truth is concealedâ€™. This publication is brought together by curators Ilaria Campioli, Joan Fontcuberta, and Matteo Guidi, and includes new essays by the curators and by author Simon Garfield. It is completed by a series of images by photographer and theorist Joan Fontcuberta in response to Ghirriâ€™s and Rambaldiâ€™s encounters with the park.