When Ed Ruscha offered to donate one of his books to the Library of Congress, his offer was declined. His response? He placed an ad in Artforum that read:
REJECTED on October 2, 1963 by the Library of Congress Washington 25, D.C., copies available @ $3.00.
At the time, American photography was just beginning to make its way into museums, which valued impeccable technique and high-quality reproduction. Ruscha’s photographs were far from that. He called them a collection of facts: simple images, bound into modest books he made himself with limited resources. His ambition was to become the Henry Ford of photo books: cheap, democratic, accessible to all.
“It was to be expected that Ruscha’s throwaway approach would not appeal to art photography chic,” wrote Gerry Badger and Martin Parr years later in The Photobook: A History.
Luigi Ghirri was also an outsider. He didn’t feel at home with most of the photography world. “Too often, this world denies its own potential, resorts to the emotionality of color, to obsessive repetition, to a repeated and concluding use of style, to categorization, to formal provocations”, says Ghirri.
Ghirri, like Ruscha, chose ordinary, seemingly banal subjects that most professional photographers did not pay attention to and both worked within a short distance of their home or studio. Ghirri, who had had a passion for travel since childhood, called his wanderings “minimal journeys.”
Ruscha’s intention was to make books and he was interested in snapshots. He worked in series. For Ghirri, it was all about photography. He took the profession extremely seriously; he developed a vision and wrote essays. For him, photography was a great adventure in thinking and looking. “The subjects of my photographs are those of the everyday,” he wrote; “they are part of our usual field of vision: so they are images that we are used to enjoying passively. These images take on a new meaning because the camera isolates them from a familiar environment, creating a new story.”
📷 Ed Ruscha: MoMA Collection
📷 Luigi Ghirri: MoMA Collection
An outsider is not dependent on the market, he or she does what his heart tells him and still dares to develop. And by that I mean daring in the sense of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard: “To dare is to lose your balance for a moment. Not daring is losing yourself.”
And now, my photograph. Taken in 2010, in the Amsterdamse bos near my home. Every day life, close to home and part of an outsiders portfolio.