George Tatge

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  print May 1981

  Franco Fontana

  Italian Photographer Franco Fontana has earned an international reputation as one of color photography’s most original exponents. Time-Life “discovered” him in its 1975 annual, publishing a group of his landscapes—elegant abstractions of nature in which details are eschewed in favor of color fields: bands of sky, sea and sand, horizons blurred into stripes from a moving car. Now Fontana is aiming a longer lens at the city and producing equally elegant urbanscapes. His new photographs, the fruit of his first trip to the U.S. and the result of only ten days’ work, bear not the slightest sign of

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  print April 1981

  Luigi Ghirri

  In 1969, from a distance of several thousand miles, a photograph was taken of the planet Earth. We saw its spherical form isolated against the blackness of outer space and we were amazed. Luigi Ghirri, an Italian draftsman working in his home town Modena, saw it and thought: “This is a picture which contains all pictures ever taken, a picture of everything we see and are, and yet a picture which shows us nothing.” Ghirri was challenged by the image, and for more than ten years now he has explored the world from his microcosmic viewfinder.

  Ghirri’s work, which he calls a photography of hieroglyphics,

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  print November 1979

  “Venezia ’79 La Fotografia”

  “Photography’s first major convocation.” “The largest cultural photographic gathering in the history of the medium.” “Venezia ’79 La Fotografia” : 4,000 photographs by 500 photographers, 26 exhibitions, 45 master workshops, 14 lectures and two symposia. By the fifth day, exhausted, you asked yourself why you were not more thankful. The next day there was still Sam Wagstaff’s collection and the Stieglitz show to see. But seeing became strabismal in the face of 4,000 photographs, especially when so many were worth looking at. You shuddered at the thought that half the shows had been eliminated,