イタリアのカラー写真界のパイオニアでもあるルイジ・ギッリ（Luigi Ghirri）によるエッセイ集。写真家になったその瞬間より写真について書き留め始めていた作者が、自身の写真集やイタリアの雑誌、新聞の為に、単に個人を振り返り書き留めるだけでなく彼の写真に対する考えを書き綴った68つに及ぶエッセイが、ギッリの写真の中核となるテーマ - アイデンティティ / 時間 / 記憶/ 構想 / 表現 / 場所への思い – 別に割り振られ構成。ウォーカー・エバンスやウィリアム・エグルストン、ロバート・アダムス、ジョン・ゴセージといった写真家の作品の他、ミュージシャンや作家、画家の作品までと広く考察されており、写真の歴史を研究するために彼自身の活動外にまでその内容は及んだものとなっている。これまでイタリア語でしか存在しなかった本書の、初めての英語版として発行。

Luigi Ghirri (1943–1992) started writing about photography from the moment he became a photographer: for his own publications, for Italian magazines and newspapers, as well as private reflections committed to paper, where his thoughts would settle and then often depart in new directions. Published for the first time in English, The Complete Essays 1973–1991 comprises sixty-eight texts in which Ghirri explores the same subjects at the core of his photographs – the themes of identity, time, memory, vision, representation, and sense of place. As a voracious reader with a particular taste for the eclectic, Ghirri also reaches outwards from his own practice to explore the history of photography as he considers the work of Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Adams and John Gossage, weaving in references to musicians, writers and painters alike. As themes and ideas overlap, the compilation of texts create a sort of dialectic chamber of curiosities that includes Gulliver, Van Gogh’s yellow house, Cézanne, Morandi’s studio, Mallarmé, the fireworks above Trani Cathedral, neo-realist films, lots of music, Francis Bacon, McLuhan’s global village, Pessoa, poetry. Together, the essays offer an unintentional yet comprehensive treatise on the history and theory of photography, and above all, they constitute a special form of autobiography.