Luigi Ghirri: The Time of the Real

Abstract

This article offers a philosophical and psychoanalytical interpretation of Luigi Ghirri’s photography, examining its relationship with time, reality and the experience of the gaze. His images are analysed as spaces of suspension in which the visible presents itself and, at the same time, withdraws, giving rise to a particular temporal experience of melancholy. Through a comparison with authors such as Benjamin, Agamben, Barthes, Deleuze and Lacan, photography emerges as a trace of an original loss, as an object capable of undermining any definitive appropriation of sense. Ghirri’s images thus appear as spaces of waiting, in which reality manifests itself in the form of a discrepancy that continues to challenge the gaze.