even*cleveland: 'ever-different splashes of sky'

'ever-different splashes of sky'

A[n] ... archival and serial thrust defines the original structure of Infinito, 1974, which Ghirri made into both an installation and a book ... The work is composed of parallel rows of photographs of skies, 365 of them, shot day after day over one year. Choosing images that are mostly abstract blocks of color, without coordinates, Ghirri suggests that it is impossible for photography to capture reality, even in fragments. The landscape is replaced by a chromatic and mental mapping. Infinito is a kind of atlas, as Ghirri called it, but the logical system that underlies the project is not so rational: The photographs are not in chronological order. Chance establishes unexpected references between ever-different splashes of sky, adding another level of narration, one more intimate and emotional.

Alessandra Pioselli, "Luigi Ghirri." Artforum International, Vol. 50, No. 9, May 2012.

Image from Infinito, available from Made in Wonder.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

'ever-different splashes of sky'

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