Colazione sull’Erba gathers Luigi Ghirri’s photographs made between 1972 and 1974 in the outskirts of Modena, a terrain he described as visited in an ironic and anxious manner. The title—Breakfast on the Grass—sets a tone that is both familiar and unsettled. Ghirri’s attention falls on the meeting of nature and artifice in the built environment: the symmetry of cypress trees, trimmed lawns, potted plants, palms, and cacti, each carrying a suggestion of elsewhere. These are not travel pictures or simple documents. They belong to the early body of work in which Ghirri mapped projects and themes around subjects or more poetic organizing principles, and they show him testing the terms of his practice.

Published by MACK in 2019, the book is modeled on Kodachrome, Ghirri’s self-published 1978 landmark. That reference matters less as homage than as a structural cue: it returns to Ghirri’s own categories and uses them as the basis for a planned series. Colazione sull’Erba is the first title in that collection, which makes it an opening statement—both a focused group of early pictures and a proposition about how his larger oeuvre might be read. The 176-page volume is an OTA bound paperback with a tipped-in image, measuring 20 by 27 cm.

Alongside original texts by Massimo Mussini and Roberto Salbitani, a contemporary essay by Francesco Zanot brings later perspective to the work. All texts appear in English, Italian, French, and German. For collectors, the interest lies in this combination: an early, coherent project from a photographer whose early work contains signposts to later directions; a deliberate dialogue with Kodachrome; and editorial framing that treats the artist’s own categories as an organizing principle. It is a book about looking at the edges of the city, where the natural and the manufactured briefly agree.