"The term 'Immagini Italian' may evoke the various travels delineated by Goethe, D.H. Lawrence, Mark Twain, and others; or, one might envision Paul Strand's people of Luzzara; the Venice of Palladio and Canaletto, or Alfred Stieglitz's Venetian boy. Pictures of piazzas articulated by magnificent duomos, packs of tourists with umbrella-waving guides, landscapes - seductive, verdant, timeless, surreal, Felliniesque - all come to mind. And so do images of the Italians themselves, careening on motorbikes, enjoying the requisite passeggiata, on strike, or...gathered in solidarity against terrorism. For many, however, the appellation "Italian images" will not immediately suggest photographs by Italian photographers."

These words, as fresh today as they were in Melissa Harris' 1993 issue of Aperture titled Immagini Italiane, would make a fine introduction to the work of Luigi Ghirri (1943-1993), who was featured in that volume. A selection of Ghirri's images appeared in "Colour Before Colour," an exhibition curated by Martin Parr for Hasted Hunt Gallery last year, but his work still remains largely unknown outside of Europe. That will surely change with an exhibition, curated by Melissa, which opens tomorrow night at Aperture Gallery.

Left: Rome, 1979, from Diaframma 11, 1/125, luce naturale (F-Stop 11, 1/125 (natural light). Right: Castellina in Chianti, 1988, from Paesaggio italiano (Italian landscape). By Luigi Ghirri, from the book, It's beautiful here, isn't it... (Aperture, 2008). Copyright the Estate of Luigi Ghirri

The book accompanying the show has an introduction by William Eggleston, a contemporary and admirer of Ghirri, himself a great admirer of the American photographer. Eggleston writes, "It is the variety of Luigi Ghirri's work, the eclectic aspect, that most surprises and excites me. I cannot necessarily tell that they are all taken by the same person-which is a compliment!...With Ghirri, it's not simply the subject matter that distinguishes each of his series, it's the whole idea of the whole picture. Everything. His work is remarkably disparate, and there are moments-many-when it just hits."

And this is one of the joys of paging through the book. It is apparent from looking at the different series of images, with titles such as Topographie-Iconographie, that Ghirri pursued photography with an intellectually rigorous approach that presaged the New Topographics movement in America before it had even been named. In Paris, 1979, he dismantles the camera's capacity to perfectly render perspective and fragments the interior scene's picture planes in vertigo-inducing style. In Parma, 1985, a photograph of tourists under the softly lit rotunda of the Teatro Farnese, the mammoth sense of scale he endows on the scene presages the work of Andreas Gursky, but in a way that is both witty and humanistic. Drawn to textures, signs and found images as well as landscapes, interiors and architecture, it is Ghirri's color palette and command of natural light that ascribe diversely different imagery to the same author.

As a photographer, writer, and curator, Ghirri influenced a generation of photographers, including Olivo Barbieri and Martin Parr. Fortunately for those fascinated by artistic process, Melissa has included a generous selection of Ghirri's writings in the book. In a section titled The World Caressed by Walker Evans, Ghirri wrote, "The feeling of separation, of extraneousness, that we feel when looking at the vast majority of photographs is due to a sense of disorientation...With Evans there is none of this at all-with his work we enter into an affectionate rapport, almost like the beginning stages of falling in love. The places, spaces, and faces are immediately recognizable, familiar, habitable."

What Ghirri meant by this is apparent in the photographs of his shown above. It also seems that by writing about Evans' process, Ghirri himself acquired the same orientation: the Italian countryside as viewed from his perspective offers a welcoming familiarity, a sense of home turf, but with a touch of poetics and surrealism that confirms this photographer's identity.

It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It: Photographs by Luigi Ghirri, opens Friday, November 7, 6:00 - 8:00 pm and runs through January 29, 2009. Aperture Gallery, 547 West 27^th Street, 4^th Floor, NYC. 212-505-5555. The book is available online. A companion exhibition is on view at Bloomsbury Auctions, November 8, 2008 - January 8, 2009. 6 West 48^th Street, NYC. 212-719-1000. In addition, a major William Eggleston retrospective opens Friday, November 7^th at the Whitney Museum of American Art. To read Eggleston's introduction to It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It, visit James Danziger's blog, The Year in Pictures.