Deserto Rosa - Luigi Ghirri

By Elisabetta Sgarbi

DVD + Book Available On IBS

The purpose of the film is to approach to the sources of emotion, which is the essential guide-line of the great photographer Luigi Ghirri's whole work. Luigi Ghirri's ultimate project, which unfortunately has not been realized, was a "house of seasons": he planned to buy a cottage - appearing in his last works - near his house in Roncocesi, with the aim of using it as a space for the staging of a series of exhibitions, each related to the going season, in order to establish a relation between the time of nature and the time of Art. "Deserto Rosa" is inspired by this interrupted project: the camera "pays visit" to a sequence of landscapes photographed by Ghirri just following the season rotation: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Night Spring.

Aleksandr Sokurov describes every season represented in the movie, focusing in a narrative form the feeling of time blindness that belonged to Luigi Ghirri.

Paola Borgonzoni Ghirri described him as follows: “Luigi Ghirri was always there, walking on a rope over a snowy meadow, on a ploughed field or vanishing in the fog, always a little higher than me even on the Adriatic beaches, in the light of one of those summer sunsets, that give this sea his hues of turquoise and emerald.”