Until May 10: POLAROID ‘79-’83. Centro Pecci Prato. Open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 am to 7 pm. Admission: €10, with reduced entrance available for select groups on the museum’s official website or on site.
What a pleasure it is to put meaning into the mundane objects that surround us—the keychains we clip onto our bags, the pins we staple to our shirts, the postcards pinned to our fridge. These tiny emblems remind us that even the simplest objects can carry stories essential to our being.
At Centro Pecci, the Luigi Ghirri exhibition, “Polaroid ’79–’83,” traces a formative moment in both the evolution of the Polaroid medium and the artist’s career. Between 1980 and 1981, Polaroid invited Ghirri to Amsterdam to document the company’s ongoing technological developments, handing him access to materials as the camera itself was being refined. Arriving with a suitcase of memorabilia and trinkets from home and flea markets, Ghirri responded in his own intuitive way, capturing the emotional weight of everyday items, an exploration of objecthood that sits at the heart of the exhibition.
Curated by Chiara Agradi and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, the exhibition features a hallway of photographs depicting flowers, statues, postcards, and assorted artworks. We see how the simplicity of these items, gestures toward something grander. To capture a moment and have it endure across decades underscores the timelessness of photography—and of the emotions we invest in the objects that carry our memories. Ranging from images of Michelangelo’s Pietà to postcards of Early Christian mosaics, these photographs, while small in scale but expansive in impact, demonstrate how art can quietly transform the contours of daily life through the memory preserved by each Polaroid.
Polaroid ’79–’83 at Centro Pecci offers a chance to revisit the formative years of Luigi Ghirri’s work and witness a pivotal moment in the history of photography. More information is available on Centro Pecci’s website.
(Bernice Nguyen)
