In 1957 the most celebrated Italian humanist photographer, Mario Giacomelli, challenged Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of the village of Scanno, taken in 1952 on assignment for Harper’s Bazaar.1 Having heard of the place from immigrants in New York after the Second World War, Cartier-Bresson knew that Scanno, in the Abruzzo region, had remained untouched by modernization.2 Appealing to the viewer’s sense of humor, he photographed the Scannesi dressed in their traditional and obsolete clothes in, for example, A Street (Figure 0.1). Perhaps not quite objects of humor, they appear nonetheless comedic with only their faces floating out of their folkloric black shrouds. By contrast, in his characteristically blurred style, Giacomelli gave his vision of Scanno a lyrical, haunting whimsicality (Figure 0.2). Unlike Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” Giacomelli stretched time out: two women are caught mid-movement walking in the foreground and slightly out of focus while the boy heading in a perpendicular line toward the camera looks eerily stopped in time. Cartier-Bresson’s humorous point of the antiquated dress is replaced with a dream-like scene in which the boy stares uncannily into the camera while two self-absorbed figures shimmer before him. Other groups follow in a disjointed procession in the distance. Years later, Giacomelli said: “Cartier-Bresson went to Scanno as the detached witness of a strange and foreign culture. I went to Scanno as a participant.”3 As an Italian from the nearby region of the Marche, and from a working-class background, Giacomelli identified with the Scannesi he was photographing. His attachment to an Italian culture and his desire to express it also surfaced in his titles, borrowed from the poems of Cesare Pavese; his polemical comment was, perhaps unconsciously, written into a history of antifascist Italianità (“Italianicity”) of which Cartier-Bresson may have been ignorant. Scanno, under Fascism, was famous for representing traditional costumes of the sort approved by the regime and often photographed as examples of appropriate rural dress. In 1963, Giacomelli’s photograph was published in the British Journal of Photography Annual and John Szarkowski bought it for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, publishing it a decade later as one of the “hundred best photographs from MoMA’s collection.”4
FIGURE 0.1 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Abruzzo, Scanno, 1951 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.
FIGURE 0.2 Mario Giacomelli, Scanno, 1957–1959 © Simone Giacomelli. Courtesy of the Archivio Mario Giacomelli Senigallia.
Like Giacomelli with Cartier-Bresson, Gianni Berengo Gardin took issue with Paul Strand’s famous photographic book Un Paese (1955), whose cover photograph was The Family, a distilled portrait of a family in Luzzara, in the region of Emilia-Romagna, sitting for the photographer outside their home (Figure 0.3). Gardin acknowledged Strand’s work as a distinguished reference for Italian photographers, saying, “Un Paese is one of the ten books I think every photographer should have on his shelf,” but questioned the validity of the American’s perspective.5 The film director Cesare Zavattini, originally from Luzzara, had collaborated with Strand on the creation of Un Paese in 1953. In 1976, Gardin echoed Strand and Zavattini's original project and accompanied the film director back to his native town to make a photobook entitled A Village Twenty Years Later (Un paese vent'anni dopo) (Figure 0.4). Taking photographs during the social unrest and terrorism of the “years of lead” (anni di piombo), Gardin worked against what he saw as a conservative, one-sided portrait of the village, which kept the elements that reflected past times and avoided any modern or industrial aspect of people’s lives. Strand had chosen Luzzara for its “average” qualities, having been appalled at the poverty he saw in Gaeta near Naples, the original town he had selected for his project, where a local woman tried to sell him her newborn baby.6 Gardin’s photographs promoted a different kind of realism to Strand’s romanticized vision. They are less static and formal, keeping the “ugly” realities of modernity inside the photographic space. Gardin also tried to find the people whose portraits Strand had photographed twenty years earlier, and attempted to recompose The Family with the remaining members, in front of a similar background. The subjects struck similar poses, but the “magic” is nonexistent in Gardin’s photographs: the man in the hat is wearing a string vest, shorts, and plastic sandals; the woman peers out warily from the darkness, rather than standing at the doorway and looking solemn and in charge. The pile of bricks alludes to a work-in-progress and the dilapidated state of the walls is the sign of an abandoned house.
FIGURE 0.3 Paul Strand, The Family, Luzzara, Italy, 1953 published in P. Strand and C. Zavattini, Un Paese (Torino: Einaudi, 1955) © Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.
FIGURE 0.4 Gianni Berengo Gardin, Untitled, c. 1975, Un paese vent’anni dopo, 1975 © Gianni Berengo Gardin. Courtesy of the photographer.
The aim of this book is not to focus on stereotypical representations of Italians or to prove the evanescent Italianità of the photographs. Its aim is to explore the specificities of Italian humanist photography in relation to its international counterparts. The notion of Italian humanist photography was inspired by, and developed from, Laure Beaumont-Maillet’s exhibition and catalog La photographie humaniste: 1945-1968. Autour d'Izis, Boubat, Brassaï, Doisneau, Ronis . . . (2006).7 Humanist photography, like social documentary photography or “concerned photography,” is considered to participate in a form of antifascism or social protest. Some of its defining characteristics are a concern with the human condition and a focus on street life, the everyday, and the misfits of society. Humanist photographers sought to achieve a styleless yet lyrical quality in their photographs, generally using black-and-white film. They mediated a sense of spontaneity and immediacy, close to that sought after by Italian neorealist film directors, combining the documentary mode and an artistic vision. Although humanist photography participated in the reconstruction of national identities on a global scale, its main exponents tend to be French and American, due to the influence of Cold War geopolitics, which privileged certain histories of photography over others.
During the postwar period, humanist photography was perceived as a transparent and universal medium and a way of celebrating democracy, brotherhood, and equality. The epic exhibition of humanist photography, Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man first shown at the MoMA in New York in 1955, aimed to transmit a message of solidarity among mankind around the world through still images. The Magnum photographic agency also contributed to establishing an international trajectory for the genre. Humanist photography spans a wide variety of photographic production, from vernacular and amateur photography to photojournalism, anthropological photographs, and art photographs. Reaching its apogee in the 1950s, it was a movement that prioritized human feelings and emotions and a sense of identity and community within an increasingly globalized, destabilized world.
In Italian academic contexts, humanist photography tends to be referred to as neorealist photography, incorporated in an internationally recognized “brand” of Italian visual culture. Neorealism, however, originally related to film and literature.8 The photography was arguably included as an afterthought in the mid-1990s, when scholars began paying attention to the vast body of photographic work produced during the period that corresponds to the neorealist movement. This began with a collaborative exhibition project on French and Italian photography entitled Invitation au voyage: la photographie humaniste française et/e la fotografia neorealista italiana (1994). In an effort to distinguish Italian humanist photography from its French counterpart, it was baptized “neorealist.”9 The connection between photography and the postwar neorealist movement had already been identified by Italo Zannier in his exhibition catalog Fotografia e Neorealismo in 1987, and he would remain the indefatigable defender of the idea for the next decade.10 Inspired by the Franco-Italian experiment, art historian Ennery Taramelli wrote the first book on “neorealist” photography, validating the medium as lying between neorealist film and literature: Voyage into Neorealist Italy (Viaggio nell’Italia del neorealismo) in 1995.11 A decade later, a major photography exhibition, NeoRealismo: la nuova immagine in Italia, 1932-1960 at Winterthur Fotomuseum in Zurich, covered a period that approximately coincides with the span of my research.12 NeoRealismo was a rich show that brought together circa 230 photographs collected by the Torinese industrialist and art collector Guido Bertero and the Milanese gallerist Enrica Viganò, whose gallery Admira deals in vintage photographs. Together they visited photographic archives from the north to the south of Italy over a period of ten years with the idea of looking for a “neorealist culture” in photography.13 They also included photography taken under Fascism, opening up the discourse to photographs that had not been considered in previous scholarship on the genre. Giuseppe Pinna’s catalog essay “Italia, Realismo, Neorealismo: la comunicazione visuale nella nuova società multimediale” expanded the field to the 1920s and 1930s, countering the traditional split between pre- and postwar visual culture.14 For political and ideological reasons, the continuity that occurred between documentary photographic cultures before and after Fascism remains underestimated in existing scholarship; it has been argued that it was impossible for traditionally left-wing Italian academia in the years following the Second World War to accept any links between postwar culture and Fascism.15 This national amnesia, which created distinct “before and after” Second World War scenarios, was first theorized by Zeev Sternhell’s groundbreaking and controversial study, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (1986), in which he connected subversive movements and revolutionary syndicalism to Fascism in France.16 Here, the focus on the slippage that exists between Fascism and humanism allows different histories to emerge, questioning accepted ideological oppositions in an ideologically loaded genre. With so many shifting chronological, terminological, and ideological parameters, scholarship on neorealist photography reveals a theoretical minefield in which discord reigns amid Italian academics and the surviving photographers themselves. Taking into account the perspective of Italian humanist photographers who were alive during the drafting of this book, I explore the ways in which national identity, culture, and politics can affect photographic vision. In this respect, the choice of the adjective “humanist” over “neorealist” was approved by many of the Italian photographers interviewed, who preferred terms like “humanist,” “lyrical realist,” or “photography of the sociale” to “neorealist” to characterize their work.17 They did not appreciate being associated with the neorealist movement due to its excessive rhetorical devices and what they perceived as a self-pitying, self-conscious mode of expression, as opposed to their direct documentation of “raw” reality.
Understood as a reaction to Fascism, “neorealist” photography becomes a miscellaneous photographic category on which to hook an idea of intellectual resistance and prise de conscience (realization), but does not allow the ideas and political constructs that formed a “humanist” photography to emerge. Moving forward from existing histories of Italian photojournalism including art historian Antonella Russo’s extensive and richly illustrated Storia culturale della fotografia italiana: Dal Neorealismo al Postmoderno (2011), Gabriele D’Autilia’s exhaustive sociopolitical photographic history, Storia della fotografia in Italia dal 1839 a oggi (2012), and Uliano Lucas and Tatiana Agliani’s La realtà e lo sguardo: Storia del fotogiornalismo in Italia (2015), this book forges new ways of thinking about the vast photographic production over a forty-year period. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it examines the ideological contradictions that can exist within an otherwise seemingly homogeneous humanist photography genre. By widening the concept of “neorealist” photography to “humanist” photography, I connect it to a belief system with which the neorealist brand is not so readily identified, despite the fact that André Bazin, the first critic to identify the genre of neorealism, appreciated it as a “kind of humanism.”18 I therefore do not do away completely with the term “neorealism” and its effects on photography. It can be convenient to integrate a cultural sense of Italianità into a photographic genre that has had little national, let alone international, exposure.19 Italian humanist photography has remained for the most part excluded from the international photographic canon dictated by North Atlantic institutions like the MoMA in New York and Tate Modern in London.
Beyond the neorealist-humanist disambiguation, one of my aims is to prioritize an art-historical dimension. This helps to place the genre within an international history of humanist photography. Today, these photographs are being sold at auction houses as art works; they are the documents that captured that period of time in our imaginations, although they did not belong to the artistic ethos of the period.20 By paying attention to the status of prints and the materiality of the photography and its reproduction in periodicals, this book also tries to render a physical account of the different photographic reproductions I handled throughout my research. This attention to materiality highlights a dialogue between photography and painting that has been overlooked or avoided in favor of neorealist connections with literature and cinema. The dissociation between photography and art also happened as a natural legacy of Croceanism. While the Neapolitan philosopher Benedetto Croce, to whom all Italian artists and intellectuals referred in the first half of the twentieth century, had embraced cinema as the seventh art, he condemned photography as “not quite art” in 1902.21 His indictment of photography would accompany the medium in Italy for decades afterward, affecting photographic style and debate even in the 1950s, when critics tried to wrest photography from its historical subjugation to painting. Instead of attempting to identify the distinguishing characters between photography and painting, I seek out the thematic and stylistic connections that may exist between them. This allows humanist photography to be interpreted through a number of different lenses and as an integral part of Italian visual culture.
What is humanism?
The basis of humanist thought, imbued with an Italian aura of critical nostalgia and haunted by the ghosts of da Vinci and Machiavelli, regarded the capacity of man to emancipate himself from religious bigotry and irrational beliefs through knowledge. The modern movement of free thought, connected to secular humanism, is considered to have started in 1600, the year the Dominican monk and philosopher Giordano Bruno was arrested by the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake for heresy and pantheism. Anticlericalism underlay the first anarchist movements of the late nineteenth century in Italy, France, and Spain; in a direct development, Italy would distinguish itself after the Second World War as an active participant in the international Marxist humanist discourse. With the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s notorious lecture L’existentialisme est un humanisme in 1946, humanism had become the locus for intellectual thought. In the aftermath of terror and totalitarianism, existentialists deemed it necessary to take personal responsibility for social change.22 Toward the late 1940s, however, humanism was already “becoming a disguise for political power struggles.”23 Humanist photography represents one of the chapters of the urgent political debates regarding the search for a “new humanism” that emerged in the postwar period and continues to be relevant to contemporary visual art practices, in terms of how they treat the human condition.24 One of the first to take a moral position on this topic was Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Author as Producer” (1934), in which he strikes out against Renger-Patzsch’s photography book The World is Beautiful (1929). Observing that Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) has “succeeded in making misery itself an object of pleasure,” Benjamin denounces the tendency of the literary movement to make “the struggle against poverty an object of consumption.”25 One of the complicated aspects of humanist photography is the underlying ideological assumption that it automatically corresponds to a left-wing attitude. As this book progresses from Fascism to the onset of the Cold War, through the Second World War and the photographic representation of the South, this association becomes increasingly unclear: humanist photographs were deployed not only in progressive magazines, but also in conservative or apolitical ones, at times inverting their original intention and meaning.
Post-Fascist intellectuals looked to the legacy of a nineteenth-century Italian socialist impetus and realist art as well as the “truth and humanity” of great Renaissance art in order to ascertain their ideological bearings.26 The emergence of a new proletariat in post-unification Italy led to a rise in class-consciousness and, after 1860, of a nationalist consciousness. Between 1888 and 1891, the Chambers of Labour were founded, followed by the anarchist movements in Rome and workers’ and miners’ strikes around the country as well as agrarian revolts. A revolutionary aura of humanitarian Socialism, drawing on readings of works by philosophers and authors including Marx, Hegel, Tolstoy, and Gorky, informed nineteenth-century progressive thought: anarcho-syndicalism was dawning.27 In art, a desire for reform was interpreted through a return to realism, in the same way as postwar neorealism sought to overcome a Fascist past. The American Magnum photographer Leonard Freed caught a striking visual echo of this in his photograph of a street in Naples in 1956: a disaffected-looking man and a woman with a child stand before political posters that reproduce Pellizza da Volpedo’s iconic painting The March of the Workers (Il cammino dei lavoratori). Also known as The Fourth State (Il Quarto Stato) from 1901, the painting was in turn inspired by a photograph of a rural scene, taken between 1896 and 1898 (Figures 0.5 and 0.6). The photographs acts as a mise en abyme of Pellizza's painting, which sought to denounce social injustice against workers and peasants. And yet, due to the lost and melancholic air of the modern disconnected couple, the photograph injects an element of existential doubt within The Fourth State’s message of working-class power. In Freed’s photograph, irony and pathos form a humanist narrative, a questioning of purpose. The divisionists emerged as a politicized art form that focused on workers, peasants, strikes, anarcho-syndicalism, and social outsiders.
FIGURE 0.5 Leonard Freed, Naples, 1956 © Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos.
FIGURE 0.6 Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Woman with child (Donna con bambino), silver bromide gelatin, 1896–98 published in A. Scotti ed., Il Quarto Stato/Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (Milano: Mazzotta, 1976). Courtesy of Associazione Pellizza da Volpedo.
In this book, four chronologically sequenced chapters are divided thematically, allowing me to focus on different theoretical, political, or historical questions for each of the four periods of photographs studied: Fascism and antifascism; the Second World War; the South; and Cold War ideology in relation to religious or political faith. Chapter 1, “Antifascist Photography under Fascism,” is an analysis of the continuation of a nineteenth-century positivist desire to document the nation from an anthropological perspective. Alongside pro-regime photographs published by the Istituto LUCE (the Fascist organ for photography), the medium was being developed within a style that resisted the mainstream visual regime. Chapter 2, “Photography, Power, and Humiliation in the Second World War,” explores the role of photographic censorship during the war. A comparison between the figure of the Fascist soldier and that of the nonspectacular Resistance fighter reveals the subtle way in which context can radically shift the interpretation of a photograph’s affect. In Chapter 3, “Christ Stopped at Eboli: An Anthropology of the South,” the Fascist and post-Fascist era come together in a chronological slippage through the exploration of the impact of Carlo Levi’s neorealist novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945). Around the same time, Antonio Gramsci's famous essay “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (1926), which was posthumously published in 1948, concerned the fate of southern peasant culture. At the onset of the Cold War, this concern extended to Italian and foreigner intellectuals alike: sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists debated over the paradox of needing to modernize and civilize the South and, conversely, conserve its dying traditions.28 Photography participated in nation-building discourses, with northern Italians gaining consciousness of an exotic, marginalized “other” world and southern Italian peasants gaining awareness of the imminent possibility of their precious culture disappearing. In Chapter 4, “Humanist Photography and The “Catholic” Family of Man,” I focus on the question of religious and political faith in humanist photography at a time when Communists and Catholics divided the country according to a Cold War logic. While the Cold War stand-off took place between figurative and Informale art after 1945, with many politically motivated artists engaging with the Italian Communist Party’s (Partito Comunista Italiano or PCI) socialist realist diktats, humanist photographers were operating in a parallel world to that of art.29 All the same, they too were participating in the cultural-philosophical quest for a new mode of representation.
The individual politics of photographers emerged as important influences on the wider trends in humanist photography in Italy. This is reflected in the fact that while Italian photographers did not have a role in Steichen’s celebrated exhibition The Family of Man (1955), their presence was noticeable in Karl Pawek’s similar and yet more controversial exhibition What is Man?, which opened in 1964 in Austria.30 Due to the way in which the genre bloomed in the 1950s, this chapter is far from an encyclopedic overview of postwar humanist photography. It would be impossible to cover every important photographer working at the time. For this reason, I have selected to focus on ideology and discuss those photographers who most strongly identified with a particular belief system. The last part of the chapter focuses on the development of photography of the urban poor in Milan’s suburbs, corresponding to some of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s iconic early works such as Ragazzi di Vita (1956) or Mamma Roma (1962). The book ends in the early 1960s, a time when Italian photography had begun to be a valid competitor on the international stage. It corresponds to a moment when photography began to be incorporated in art practices, beginning with pop art in the late 1950s to conceptual Arte Povera in the late 1960s with Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, or Franco Vaccari. In 1962, the Second Vatican Council (1962–68) inaugurated a new ideological era by addressing the relations between the Catholic Church and the modern world, while Federico Fellini’s iconic film, La Dolce Vita (1960), announced the dawn of the cult of celebrity mediated through photography. Taken before the economic miracle—a period of rapid development and urbanization considered to have peaked between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s—the black-and-white photographs capture the richness of a complex and archaic society, poised on the threshold of industrialization. This vast and virtually unexploited national treasure documents a transformative period in Italian history, when photographers were developing a language with which to emancipate themselves from Fascism while conserving a disappearing culture.