The Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato is hosting from November 22, 2025 to May 10, 2026 the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. Polaroids ’79 -’83, curated by Chiara Agradi and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, with an installation conceived by Ibrahim Kombarji, and realized in collaboration with the Luigi Ghirri Foundation. This is the first exhibition in Italy entirely dedicated to the production on polaroids of the famous Italian photographer after World War II.
Ghirri’s research lies between a conceptual approach to the photographic medium and a construction of the image that elicits empathy. His shots take in objects charged with memory, the layered complexity of the Italian landscape and the people who inhabit it. The questions raised by his work concern the very workings of photography, from the coexistence of different times within an image to the composition that simultaneously includes and excludes, from the splitting of reality inherent in photography to the revelation of what remains invisible even though it is in plain view.
The exhibition brings together a wide selection of Polaroids taken by Ghirri between 1979 and 1983. In those years the Polaroid company provided him with a considerable amount of film and equipment, bringing him closer to instant-development photography. Between 1980 and 1981 the photographer was invited to Polaroid’s European headquarters in Amsterdam to experiment with the 20x24 Instant Land Camera, capable of taking large-format images in just over a minute. Polaroids, both small and large, return an unprecedented Ghirri: on the one hand, the photographer who, at the end of the 1970s, after a decade of rigorous technical and conceptual control, welcomes the unpredictability of the instantaneous medium and the possibility of immediately seeing the result of the image; on the other hand, the artist who, far from his Emilia, recreates a personal universe of objects and memories, arranging in front of the lens some elements selected and brought with him to Holland from Italy.
The exhibition aims to invite younger visitors in particular to reflect on the affinities between instant-development analog photography and the visual immediacy that has now become habit thanks to smartphones and digital. Ghirri’s work, which has also become familiar to the general public through exhibitions, editorial covers and reproductions in newspapers and magazines, will be able to be rediscovered in a new light, thanks to a nucleus of works documenting a chapter of the master’s production that is still little explored.
Pictured: Luigi Ghirri, Modena (1980), detail. Courtesy of the heirs of Luigi Ghirri
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| At the Pecci Center in Prato, the first exhibition in Italy entirely devoted to Ghirri's polaroid production |
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