The Map and The Territory gathers the first decade of Luigi Ghirri’s photographic work into a sustained study of how images shape our understanding of place. Published by MACK in 2019, the 350-page volume follows a practice developed across the 1970s and 1980s, when Ghirri photographed the changing everyday spaces of Italy with an attentive, open-ended empathy. His subject is not simply the landscape, but the layers through which the landscape is represented: maps, posters, reproductions, models, pictures, and other images that stand between direct experience and the world itself.

Compiled by curator James Lingwood, the book reconstructs the fourteen narrative sequences presented in Ghirri’s 1979 exhibition Vera Fotografia in Parma. These include early photographs, Kodachrome, Catalogo, Atlante, Italia Ailati, Vedute, Infinito, In Scala, and Still Life, among others. The arrangement makes the breadth of Ghirri’s project legible without reducing it to a single style. Colour, still life, architectural views, and images of images become related investigations into scale, illusion, memory, and the quiet instability of the familiar.

The book’s importance lies in this combination of conceptual clarity and modest observation. Ghirri proposed a new kind of geography—one attentive to the distance between territory and its representations, and to an Italy poised between inherited forms and modern visual culture. His photographs turn that distance into a field of reflection while retaining a sense of curiosity and play. As a record of the formative first decade of a major European photographic practice, and as the catalogue accompanying exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, Museo Reina Sofía, and Jeu de Paume, this hardback offers collectors a substantial, carefully structured account of Ghirri’s method and its enduring questions.