Olivo Barbieri

Alps. Geographies and People emerges from a sustained aerial documentation project that interrogates how human interventions, tourism, infrastructure, and urban sprawl reshape the fragile topography of the European mountain range. Originating from Barbieri's broader investigation into contemporary geography and artificial perception, the series shifts the focus from untouched majesty to the complex interplay between pristine nature and anthropogenic footprint.

The publication is structured as a sweeping visual traverse across high-altitude landscapes, sequencing sweeping aerial plates that contrast traditional alpine villages and winding transit arteries with vast glacial recessions, ski resorts, and engineering works. By juxtaposing macro-scale geography with specific traces of human presence, the book maps the transformation of a legendary wilderness into a managed, heavily consumed tourist and industrial zone.

Physically, the volume is characterized by expansive landscape layouts, crisp high-resolution aerial reproduction, and precise tonal rendering that captures the blinding glare of snow and the stark, geometric imposition of human structures against raw stone.

On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of its first edition, Quodlibet republishes Viaggio in Italia. Conceived by Luigi Ghirri, published for the first and only time in 1984, it is a cornerstone of the history of contemporary photography. The ideas that guided it are the manifesto of the Italian School of Landscape.

In the early 1980s, Luigi Ghirri gathered around himself a group of twenty photographers who, since the end of the previous decade, had been experimenting with unconventional ways of representing reality and the social changes taking place almost everywhere in the country. The comparison would give rise to the collective exhibition Viaggio in Italia, inaugurated on January 15, 1984 at the Pinacoteca Provinciale in Bari and repeated in Genoa, Ancona, Rome, Naples and Reggio Emilia. The exhibition was accompanied by the volume of the same name, designed by Ghirri and Paola Borgonzoni, with an essay by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and a text by Gianni Celati. In the indeterminacy that surrounds the memory of the event, it will be the book itself that will consolidate its international critical success and transmit the concept of territory understood as a system of unsuspected, everyday resources, far from the sensationalism of the news as from the sweetened panorama of the postcard. As Quintavalle observes: «All postcards are equally unrealistic, they are mythical representations of ideal cities where the reality of living, of managing, of everyday space, the reality of what today we call urban space, the furniture, or the architecture of the interiors is completely mystified, indeed cancelled, removed. We experience the falseness of our world in postcards, a double that is absurd because it does not exist, it does not represent anything. In short, by sending postcards, we make symbolic journeys and Ghirri, in his time, made our consciences travel in the history of these fictitious universes». No one has sent postcards for years, but the tendency to represent the landscape in a holographic and virtual way in the worst sense of the term has not disappeared, therefore the invitation to travel by deviating from the only path promoted by the maps is still current.

The new edition is the facsimile reproduction of the first, published by Il Quadrante di Alessandria in 1984. All the details of the original book have been faithfully preserved, adopting the design, the layout of the text and the sequence of the original images, the material properties and the dimensions of the pages. To obtain a more adequate rendering of the images, the reproduction of the photographs was made starting from the re-digitalization of the negatives or original prints. The volume is accompanied by a 48-page issue with an essay on the genesis and critical success of Viaggio in Italia edited by Matteo Balduzzi, Fabio De Chirico, Gabriella Guerci, Matteo Piccioni, a note by Adele Ghirri and the French and English translations of the original texts by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and Gianni Celati (published in Italian in the book). Twenty photographers participated in the Viaggio: Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Gianantonio Battistella, Vincenzo Castella, Andrea Cavazzuti, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Vittore Fossati, Carlo Garzia, Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Shelley Hill, Mimmo Jodice, Gianni Leone, Claude Nori, Umberto Sartorello, Mario Tinelli, Ernesto Tuliozi, Fulvio Ventura, Cuchi White.