Photography and Italy

Percorsi della fotografia in Italia, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Contrasto Edizioni, Roma 2011 (pp. 187, € 25)
Photography and Italy, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Reaktion Books, London 2011 (pp. 187, UK 15.95, US $ 29.95)

With his corrosive taste for paradox, Lewis Baltz once suggested that the great fanfare that accompanied the 150th anniversary of photography in 1989 should rather be seen as the funeral service for a medium murdered and buried under its own ideology. "By 1990," he once wrote, "it seemed that the world had, in a sense, already ended. That is, it had withdrawn itself from our apprehension. After 1990, no one had time for documentary images, least of all myself…" [1].

Baltz's words come to mind while reading Photography and Italy, the first history of this kind written in 25 years. Published in midst of a debate over the medium's identity and during the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the country's unification, Pelizzari's book is an invaluable scholarly work that promises to raise important issues at a more general level. Can we still construct cultural narratives based on the canonical notion of "photography" as representation, authorship, and technology? Is it still productive to talk about "Italy" in a perspective of increasing internationalization and deterritorialization? A factual answer to these questions comes down directly from the background of Photography and Italy. The book is the latest in a thematic series published by Reaktion Books on the relationship between photography and other domains, including the arts (literature, cinema), nations and continents (Australia, Egypt, Africa, USA), and branches of human thought or action (spiritualism, science, flight). After a half century of generalist histories – such as Beaumont Newhall's The History of Photography, first conceived at the end of the 1930s and still widely reprinted, Peter Pollack's The Picture History of Photography (1958), and Naomi Rosenblum's A World History of Photography (1984) – in the 1980s historians (particularly French) began to realize that no single voice could ever account for the growing quantity of issues and data unearthed in Europe and America over the previous decades. Michel Frizot's A New History of Photography (1998) is a case in point, with contributions from over 30 specialists offering multiple perspectives on the medium's social, cultural, and political underpinnings. In a more traditional fashion, the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography (2007), the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography (2005), and The Oxford Companion to the Photograph (2007) have recently come to fill a gap in the basic toolbox of the photohistorian.

In such overviews Italian photography has been generally underrepresented, mostly due to the country's traditional polycentrism and to the lack of general studies on the modernization of its visual culture. Photography and Italy appears to strike a balance between the need for a unified narrative and the recent historiographical trend toward the multiplication of approaches and perspectives. Beautifully written in a clear-cut, essential prose, it is a monograph in its own right, equally based on original research and on the most updated literature. The book is organized chronologically around thematic clusters: the peculiar encounter of technology and archaeology ("Modern Pictures of an Ancient World"), the emergence of the nation-state ("Risorgimento Mythologies"), the contradictions of industrialization ("Romance of Stone and Steel"), the democratization of photographic practices ("Amateurs and Professionals"), the articulations of avant-garde from Futurism to Fascism ("Italian Modernities"), the ethics of Neorealism ("Postwar Narratives"), the slow emergence of an experimental, self-reflexive, and conceptuallydriven approach from the 1950s to the 1980s ("The Margins of the Frame"), and the new quest for identity and the self ("Alienation and Belonging").

According to Pelizzari, the eight chapters build up "a non-linear narrative, unusual and, at times, beautiful for its contradictions". (p. 9) At the same time, they contribute to a larger field of thematic studies developed in the last decades at the international level, raising issues of authorship, gender, politics, colonialism, and society. Pelizzari's previous studies testify of her longstanding predilection for these themes, with a particular focus on the representation of space and architecture, and of her commitment to collaborative projects.
An associate professor in the Department of Art, Hunter College, and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, in the late 1980s she set out to investigate the photography of "bourgeois spaces" in 19th-century Italian cities. Since then she has published several essays and edited various collective works, including an issue on 19thcentury Italy of the journal History of Photography (1996), the volume Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation (2003), and a special issue of Visual Resources on the "Intersection of Photography and Architecture" (with Paolo Scrivano, 2011).

In Photography and Italy, our contemporary tension between identity and dispersion is brought to bear on the very history of Italian photography. "Paradoxically – Pelizzari states in the introduction – what makes this history 'Italian' is its polycentric, even somewhat foreign, character." (p. 7) The entire book is framed around the idea that photographic practices evolved in Italy in response to a variety of centrifugal forces, which thrived in the absence of a centralized role of the modern state. On the one hand, the typical fragmentation of the country's urban structure – the so-called "hundred cities," each one distinguished by its history and culture – has been an invaluable asset to 19thcentury photographers, both in terms of subject matter (especially monuments and works of art) and economically (for the local demand of portraits and visual documents). On the other, the constant presence of international photographers and foreign buyers in all the richest cities of the Grand Tour fostered the growth of a market oriented to tourism, which in the long run influenced the ways of seeing and representing the country. In the background, the Italian state lagged behind other European states both as a promoter of photographic campaigns and in providing a unified system of laws on intellectual property and on the reproduction of images.

Thus, while Florence, Rome, and Milan soon emerged as the most dynamic centers of economic and intellectual advancement, the culture and the imagination of 20th-century photographers was equally influenced by peripherical cities like Senigallia, Palermo, and Modena, or regions such as Basilicata and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. And while the Alinari Brothers or Mario Giacomelli played a distinctive role in the construal of national images particularly influential for the international public, such figures as Frédéric Flachéron, Count Primoli, Elio Vittorini, Cesare Zavattini, and Luigi Ghirri (to name a few) crafted original visions out of their international experience and were often crucial in bridging photography and other practices of representation, namely painting, literature, and cinema.

Upon these premises, Photography and Italy subverts the "essentialist" perspective of groundbreaking studies published in the 1980s and '90s, such as Giulio Bollati's "Il modo di vedere italiano" (The Italian way of seeing) and Federico Zeri's "La percezione visiva dell'Italia e degli italiani" (The visual perception of Italy and of Italians). Extending her research to the context of photographic objects – including the spaces of intellectual exchange (debates, journals, associations) and the channels of "consumption" (studios, exhibitions, newspapers, books) – Pelizzari reevaluates certain characters of modernity that photographic practices embodied since their appearance in the Romantic Era: the rapid formation and circulation of visual models (albeit stereotyped or falsified), the internationalization of know-how, the cross-fertilization of artistic and professional activies, the fragmentation, reproduction, and dispersion of images.

What begins to take shape between the lines of this story is the map of an Italian modernity that is "alternative" to the great national and industrial states of the 19th century. Italian photography, we should add, was hindered by a narrower economic base compared to the United States; by a more limited role of the State compared to France; by a slower technological innovation compared to Germany. And yet, Pelizzari suggests, Italy's distinctive version of photographic modernization emerged at a superstructural level, in the "repetition of iconic and formulaic views, at the risk of obliterating the modern and dynamic transformations of a country in the making". (p. 169, my emphasis) It is precisely the conscious risk of repetition with slight variation that pushed the photographic market in the 19th century; and it was often its mirror image – either polemical or ironic – that nourished 20th-century images of Italy (Marinetti's cry "Kill the moonlight!" of 1909 may well be aimed at Carlo Naya's romantic montages of Venice by night that had been circulating for over 30 years).

Pelizzari's survey appears at a crucial moment in the debate over the role of photography in the past and in the future of Italian public culture. Despite the international trend toward the absorption of photography into the realm of "optical-based media" and of art in general, in Italy a modernistic notion of the medium as a distinct practice of representation has reaffirmed itself over the past twenty years, not so much on theoretical grounds as through a flurry of photographic magazines, festivals, galleries, fairs, and specialized publishers. Sporadic attempts at rejuvenation have come from the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Cinisello Balsamo (near Milan), which was launched few years ago with an international conference addressing the question: "Is Photography Contemporary?" Meanwhile, plans for a new "photography museum" connected to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO) have been announced in Rome. The issue remains whether a museum (or any other cultural space) of the 21st century conceived around the word "photography" – independently from the quality and originality of its exhibits – is bound to become an antiquarian shop, a potentially endless archive of modernity, or an active place of information and confrontation for both the artists and the public.

While Photography and Italy is not meant as a blueprint for museum directors and curators, it does provide useful information, as well as food for thought, on the ways similar issues have been addressed in the past. Perhaps more simply, but equally important, it reminds us that good historians, like good photographers, curators, critics, and citizens, are those with an ability to renew our understanding of what we see, or don't see. In her own words, even "in a world that has been fully mapped and represented," the struggle should continue "to find a new language, overcoming the redundancy of what has been represented and narrated, and challenging a codified knowledge of what has been imagined." (p. 169)

NOTES
[1] Lewis Baltz. Opere/Progetti, exhibition folder, Civici Musei in Reggio Emilia, curated by Roberto Margini, 30 November 1991-5 January 1992.