Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]

 Instead of seeking to introduce new situations and ways of working, photography has moved into a phase of obsessively reproducing itself. (1985) 
 Instead of accepting the challenge of complexity, photography shunted itself into a tight corner—the reproduction of itself. 
 I have always felt that photography is a language for seeing and not for transforming, hiding, or modifying reality. 
 …a man photographed is always no more than a photograph. 
 Certain maniacal aspects seem dangerous to me: photography as the aphasia of seeing, the antechamber for the anaesthetization of the glance, the need to be original and creative at all costs, the desperate search for the new and for a trademark… 
 Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation. 
 Photography has become an opaque layer, thick with images that are superimposed on reality itself—the debris of our age… 
 Paradoxically perhaps… the moment a photographer thinks he is showing us reality is the moment when it is most distant. 
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