Meet Giovanni Ghidini, an Artist Who’s Spent Over 25 Years on a Single Project
Above: Artist Giovanni Ghidini. Opposite: A photograph from his series “52 Ludlow,” Polaroid 665 negative printed in platinum.
This is a story about an artist named Giovanni Ghidini. No, you have not heard of him, and with good reason: He has spent more than a quarter century working on a single project, one that marries horticulture, sculpture, and photography in a meditation on life and death, nature and human manipulation of it, and what it means to make art.
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Ghidini planted, tended, and sculpted dozens of sunflowers day in and day out, then watched as they withered and died, photographing them at the end of this annual cycle of life. Every year, for 25 years. He rarely left his rooftop garden and the adjacent studio where he lived.
Other artists have spent decades laboring over their magnum opuses—Michael Heizer and James Turrell, with their sprawling land projects in the American West (City and Roden Crater, respectively), spring to mind—but few, if any, have worked only on those pieces. Now 67, Ghidini has dedicated the better part of his adult life to this one series, titled “52 Ludlow” for the address where he made it, producing just four or five images to his satisfaction each year, waiting until he’d shot his very last frame before beginning to make any prints, and rarely revealing to anyone what he was up to in his open-air workspace several stories above New York City’s Chinatown.
When you photograph other people, it’s always their story; it’s never your story.
I first met Ghidini over email in the summer of 2023. My friend Andrea Glimcher, founder of the artist- management agency Hyphen, introduced us. She had come to know him through the well-regarded painter and sculptor June Leaf, who was one of her clients and a longtime intimate of Ghidini’s. Leaf, Glimcher, and Ghidini all happened to have the same birthday, August 4, and had often celebrated together, either at the Nova Scotia home Leaf shared with her husband, the revered photographer Robert Frank, or at Glimcher’s place in Southampton, N.Y. Ghidini invited me to make a studio visit, so on a Saturday afternoon that October, I found myself climbing four very narrow, very steep flights of stairs to his fifth-floor walk-up, an airy, nearly empty live-work space in New York’s NoHo, where he relocated a few years ago. I have made hundreds of studio visits over the years and generally find them enlightening, even fascinating, but I’ve rarely emerged from one on such a high, floored by the purity and authenticity of Ghidini’s practice. In an art system that has grown increasingly commercial since the late ’90s, when I began covering it, he is an extreme outlier, content not to exhibit, not to be part of the conversation, but to simply make his own work in a compact universe of his own creation. I returned to his apartment on a bitterly cold day this past January to talk more in depth about his life and the project, which he is sharing with the wider world for the first time in these pages.
Ghidini is tall and thin, with the wild mane of a lion and a beard that conceals much of his face. He dresses in bespoke clothing with a rustic, functional appeal; his shoes, a hybrid of Birkenstocks and an old shirt, have a button-close pocket on top. His father gave him his first camera, a Soviet-made Zenit, when he was 8. I ask what the first thing he trained it on was, and he considers before responding that it was his mother’s flowers. His lined face softens at the memory and the unearthed connection to “52 Ludlow.” “I never think about the first picture that I did, the first roll of film, was [of ] the geranium of my mother in Italy,” he says in his heavily accented English, then recalls how she kept the red-blooming plants in front of the windows to ward off mosquitoes, which dislike their scent. He began to study photography, and after a two-year stint as a photographer in the Italian navy, he opened a studio in his hometown of Milan, already a fashion capital in the late ’70s. Ghidini was only 20 or 21, but his career quickly took off, with bookings to shoot fashion as well as celebrity portraits. “In reality, I didn’t like it,” he says. “I really feel, I want to do something for myself. When you photograph other people, it’s always their story; it’s never your story.”
Then, one day in his late 20s, he decided “no more.” He closed his studio the next day, and he and his wife, an Illinois-born model named Malena Holcomb, packed up and moved to the United States.
The couple arrived in New York with no concrete plans—and no American credit history, making it nearly impossible to secure a lease on an apartment. Instead, they wound up at the Gramercy Park Hotel, which was known for offering cheaper rentals to artists. Ghidini took on projects that were meaningful to him, but the outcomes of two were particularly disheartening. For a shoot that ran in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, he traveled to Oregon and photographed the clothing line Prison Blues on some of the actual inmates who sewed the garments. He wasn’t prepared for the backlash of angry readers railing at what they perceived as the idealization of hardened criminals.
There was a Robert Frank, 7 Bleecker Street. So I call him: ‘I’m Giovanni from Italy. Can I meet you?
Then he spent two years preparing to direct an independent film in Cuba about velodrome racers. Although the Castro regime had given permission for the project to proceed, the government pulled the plug and expelled Ghidini from the country, leaving him able to cobble together only an 11-minute short. Venceremos! (We Will Win!) was accepted at the Sundance Film Festival and several other festivals around the world in 1998, but he found little solace. “From that experience, I decided that I don’t want to do movies anymore, I don’t want to work with people anymore,” he recalls. Ghidini says the producer told him he doesn’t have any rights to the film, and he does not even possess a copy. The irony, he adds, is that a friend told him the short has aired on Cuban TV.
Though his practice was not where he wanted it to be, he had found a friend and mentor in Robert Frank, whose 1958 book Les Américains (published in the U.S. as The Americans) has influenced generations of photographers. Ghidini first saw it when he was about 13 and was drawn to its “neorealismo.” In 1995, he found Frank’s number in the phone book. “There was a Robert Frank, 7 Bleecker Street,” he says. “So I call him: ‘I’m Giovanni from Italy. Can I meet you?’ He say, ‘OK, come tomorrow.’ ”
During that initial visit, Ghidini says, they conversed “like neighbors”—about Zurich, where Frank was born and raised, and Milan. Frank was more than 30 years Ghidini’s senior and by then had suffered the tragic pre-mature deaths of both of his children. He had grown somewhat reclusive, but the two men forged a bond. Frank shared his own early struggles—he immigrated in the late ’40s and was quickly signed by Harper’s Bazaar, then also quit fashion photography soon after—and helped mentally prepare Ghidini to pursue artmaking, even if he didn’t advise the younger man on specifics. “We don’t talk too much about photography…. I was more interested in what there is behind photography: his life.”
After the Times Magazine and Venceremos! fiascos, a dejected Ghidini at least was able to find a new apartment. He and Holcomb moved into a studio at 52 Ludlow Street in Chinatown. The space was tiny: They furnished it with a bed and a table. But it sat like a box atop the building’s roof, and in what proved to be a life-changing detail, that rooftop space was part of the deal. When Ghidini stepped outside, he found himself standing opposite a mottled gray wall.
“I was there every day, trying to find something—how can I explain? How can I start to tell my story, without putting people inside?” Ghidini recalls. “One or two years, I face this gray wall in front of me.” He did not photograph it or anything else during this time. He simply stared at the gray surface, day after day, in a kind of meditation. The wall on the roof five floors above Lower Manhattan became an unexpected stand-in for his life, and he concluded that it must play a part in his art.
Finally, one day he placed a small flower in front of it. Then he tried a sunflower. “I saw the sunflower move, with the light,” he says. The young blossom tracked the sun. “I say, ‘OK, if I do this in front of the gray wall, maybe I can start to tell my story.’ ”
Ghidini was well aware that sunflowers were a loaded subject to take on: The plants hold a place of honor in art history, with heavyweights Monet, Klimt, Schiele, Rivera, and O’Keeffe among the multitude of artists who have painted the blooms. But it’s van Gogh’s vases stuffed full of the variety, rendered in a rich palette of yellows and oranges, that loom largest in the canon.
Still, Ghidini was determined, not deterred: “I said, ‘Maybe I can do something that nobody ever did with the sunflower. I can show sunflower in a different way, because normally, sunflower is always blooming. I’m more interested when sunflower is dead.’”
Though his paternal ancestors had been farmers, Ghidini had never gardened. He learned by doing, by observing. “You have to be there all day, every day,” he explains. “You have to give water in the morning, in the evening. You can’t go anywhere. You have to stay there.” Holcomb, who had become a partner in a creative agency representing hairstylists and make-up artists, left in the mornings and returned in the evenings. Ghidini seldom went anywhere—not to restaurants or movies or the theater. “You go the speed of nature. Nature is not fast; it’s very slow,” he says. “You have to wait. You have to wait. You have to wait. You have to have patience.”
Not only did he nurture the flowers from seeds to towering plants, but he also coaxed the stalks into all manner of sculptural forms, little by little twisting a stem into a spiral as it grew, for example, curving it into a closed ellipse or winding one around another to create the illusion of legs. In the photographs, several appear to be walking; one, bent in a 90-degree angle, looks like it’s sitting in a chair.
I acquired a print last year, one of a defoliated plant that bears an uncanny resemblance to my late, very tall, bald father when he was in his 80s and walked at an angle not 100 percent vertical. Such anthropomorphism was not lost on Ghidini. “I think it’s the only flower that look like us,” he says.
Every March for 25 years, Ghidini began the process anew. Each cycle started with 50 to 60 plants. Come winter, when they were dead, he would bring them inside to dry. I ask if the apartment, which was maybe 300 square feet, had room for up to five dozen pots holding stems as tall as seven feet. “Yeah, there was no space for us, but, you know, for the sunflower,” he says with a laugh. “We always have nothing in the house.” As the months wore on, sometimes heads would break off or stems snap. Birds would snack on the flowers. Occasionally, someone would climb onto the roof from an adjoining building and steal or vandalize them. By the time they were ready to be memorialized in front of the gray wall, he could extract just a handful of photographs that met his standards. Because many were so tall, he often shot them in sections; the final images are stacked two or three Polaroids high.
Though the only objects that remain of the exercise are photographs, in Ghidini’s mind “52 Ludlow” is equally, or more, an exploration of sculpture—but an ephemeral kind. “Photography is just the last of the work,” he explains. “Before, there is probably seven, eight, or nine [months], one year of work. The photography, just one second at the end…. You have to forget about the photography. In reality, this is not photography, right?”
Ghidini also sees the series as inextricably connected to his experience as a foreigner in the U.S. “I am an immigrant,” he says. “Here, you know that is not your place. So up there, I build my place.” He was perched above New York, not really of it. Rather than confining, he found the hermetic isolation liberating, compared to always having someone around in Milan. The most difficult aspect was the incessant questioning from friends and family back home about what he was up to. (He visited Italy only when his crops had died.) He knew they suspected he’d gone crazy long ago. Frank, Leaf, and Holcomb were the exceptions—and also the only people he showed some of his Polaroid negatives.
You go the speed of nature. Nature is not fast; it’s very slow.
Ghidini might still be tending his sunflowers were it not for two insurmountable obstacles. First, he ran out of Polaroid 665 film. After the company discontinued it in the mid-aughts, he bought up as much as he could find on eBay and stockpiled it as best he could. “There was no food inside the refrigerator,” he says. “Only Polaroid 665.”
But the clock was ticking. “Then they kicked me out because the building start to tilt,” he says. The other tenants at 52 Ludlow quickly left, but the landlord allowed Ghidini to stay two months longer so he could complete what was to be the final cycle in 2022. The eviction seemed a poetic conclusion to the series: He was down to his last packages of 665. By then, he’d been using expired film for years. The old stock could be unpredictable—the edges of an image sometimes seemed to melt away—which, at first, frustrated him, but “soon I became fascinated.”
Ghidini and Holcomb moved about a mile uptown, to the NoHo apartment; there was no outdoor space, but the studio fit a sofa and a couple of desks in addition to the bed and table—and still had the close-to-vacant feel they liked. It was also just around the corner from Leaf, who by then was widowed. Ghidini had promised Frank, who died in 2019 at the age of 94, he’d look after her, and this past July he was at her bedside when she passed away, also at 94. His photograph of a sunflower, its stem in a loop, hung above her kitchen table.
He had relished the anticipation—the patience—inherent in not making prints as he went, but three or four years ago, he gathered up the Polaroid negatives and began to work with an expert printer, first trying silver before turning to platinum, the medium he finds superior for achieving the rich range of grays he desires. “I’m never black and white; there is always a shade of gray,” he says. “It’s my way of thinking. And of course, for me, it’s a precious thing, so I wanted to print it in the [most] precious way possible.”
I start to ask what if he hadn’t had to leave 52 Ludlow, hadn’t run out of film, but he answers before I finish: “Kept going. Kept going.”
Image at top: Portrait by Donavon Smallwood/Ludlow Series, courtesy of Giovanni Stefano Ghidini
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