Luca Guadagnino’s curation of rare Luigi Ghirri photographs in London is quietly emotional

‘Luigi Ghirri: Felicità’ at Thomas Dane Gallery proposes happiness not as a condition to be attained, but as a way of inhabiting the world through images. This is not joy as spectacle or affirmation, but something quieter and more exacting: the felicity of naming, noticing and holding things in view without exhausting them. Curated by Alessio Bolzoni and Luca Guadagnino, and unfolding across both of Thomas Dane’s Duke Street spaces, the exhibition makes a persuasive case for Ghirri as one of the most lucid thinkers of photography’s perceptual limits – and one of its most generous practitioners.

The exhibition’s physical split is not incidental. Moving between the two galleries feels like moving between registers of looking: from surface to space, from image as object to image as environment. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s curatorial touch is deliberately light, allowing Ghirri’s internal logic to emerge through juxtaposition rather than didactic framing. What results is not a survey, but a carefully calibrated rhythm – one that mirrors Ghirri’s own conception of photography as an open, elastic system rather than a sequence of definitive statements.

The photographs that anchor the first space are small, restrained, almost stubbornly unassuming. Works such as Sassuolo, 1970 and the cluster of Modena images made between 1970 and 1973 appear to offer very little at first glance: fragments of walls, signage, partial horizons, colours softened into chalky blues and muted reds. But this reduction is precisely the point. Ghirri understood that modern landscapes – particularly the Italian countryside – had become visually exhausted, over-coded by clichés and nostalgia. Rather than attempting to restore a lost pastoral ideal, he chose to work from within this representational void.

These early images operate like a pared-down vocabulary of place. In Modena, 1971, a sign gestures beyond the frame, pointing nowhere in particular. In another Modena photograph, from 1972, a strip of sky presses against a flat plane of colour, collapsing depth into surface. The photographs refuse narrative resolution; instead, they ask the viewer to stay with the act of looking itself. Happiness, here, is not revelation but attention.

This emphasis on surfaces, maps and signs establishes a logic that carries into the second Duke Street space, where interiors and landscapes extend the same conceptual enquiry. Wallpapers photographed in the mid-1970s flatten rooms into graphic fields, turning domestic space into another kind of atlas. Walls behave like pages; photographs become images of images. The boundary between inner and outer worlds – so central to Ghirri’s thinking – begins to dissolve.

The later works bring this sensibility into the open air. In Capri, 1981 and Croce Bianca, Piacenza, 1984, colour becomes more luminous, but never expressive in a sentimental sense. The compositions are precise, almost architectural, holding the viewer at a measured distance. Landscapes from the late 1980s: Campagna Emiliana, 1985-89, Marina di Ravenna, 1986, are neither celebratory nor elegiac. They refuse the familiar drama of old versus new, rural versus industrial. Instead, they present a world shaped by coexistence, where distinctions have lost their visual productivity.

This curatorial decision to skirt Ghirri’s most iconic images in favour of quieter, less resolved works sharpens the exhibition’s thesis. ‘Felicità’ is not about reclaiming landscape or reasserting photography’s authority. It is about recalibrating the gaze. Ghirri believed photography should organise attention rather than overwhelm it – offering a pause within a world increasingly governed by speed, repetition and visual noise. His images do not seek to transform reality; they allow it to appear, lightly and with measure.

Seen today, Ghirri’s work feels less prophetic than necessary. In an image economy driven by excess and instant legibility, ‘Felicità’ argues for another mode of seeing: photography as a way of staying with things, of accepting their partiality, of recognising that meaning often resides in what remains unresolved. Bolzoni and Guadagnino’s exhibition doesn’t present happiness as an outcome, but as a condition of looking – one grounded in silence, precision and the radical modesty of paying attention.

Luigi Ghirri: Felicità is at Thomas Dane Gallery from 23 January to 11 April 2026, thomasdanegallery.com