1

Antifascist Photography under Fascism

The Fascist regime silenced intellectuals, journalists, novelists, politicians, homosexuals, gypsies, and ordinary citizens who expressed anger against the regime, by using violence or sending them al confino (into internal exile).1 The people welcoming those banished tended to be peasants who had had little contact with modern civilization. They still lived according to “primitive” religious rituals that belonged to a pre-Christian belief system, which is described in Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945). The gritty reality of peasant lives and their “backward” superstitious beliefs were kept out of the public aesthetic realm. Peasants could easily slip into the group of “social outsiders” by Fascist regime standards, which included “the poor, the unemployed, alcoholics, ex-convicts, and the mentally ill.”2 Underreported aspects of everyday life in the countryside included the fact that nearly half of Italy’s population lived in grim poverty in 1937: “21.6% of Italian houses have no kitchen; 43.3% are without drinking water; 29.5% have no lavatory; 42% are without electricity.”3 Despite the large swathes of the disenfranchised in existence, they barely appear in regime photographs, periodicals, or photographic exhibitions of the time: on the contrary, the regime needed to promote a strong and powerful image of the nation.

As Italy played catch-up with the international avant-garde, Mussolini chose 1932, the year marking a decade of Fascism since the Blackshirts marched on Rome on October 28, 1922, as the symbolic moment to impress the international community with a show of Fascist might, creativity, and innovation. The spectacular and visually overpowering Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution made use of 12,000 documentary photographs in mural photomontages (or “photo-mosaics”) to cover the walls and the ceilings of the twenty-four display rooms of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.4 Mario Sironi, one of the main organizers of the exhibition, had been struck by El Lissitzky’s photomural at Pressa in Cologne in 1928 and the way in which photography could have so many uses.5 This photographic moment can be symbolized by a shift that occurred in the practice of Achille Bologna, who was commissioned to produce one of the advertising posters for the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. Nothing in Bologna’s 1932 poster correlated with his mawkish First Heartache from 1924 (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).

FIGURE 1.1 Achille Bologna, Poster for The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, 1932. Courtesy Fondazione Micheletti. Museo dell’Industria e del Lavoro di Brescia.

FIGURE 1.2 Achille Bologna, First heartache (Primo dolore), in Luci ed ombre: annuario della fotografia artistica italiana, exhibition catalogue (Turin, 1924), p. XXX.

Published in the second edition of the annual exhibition catalogue Luci ed Ombre in Turin, First Heartache is a black-and-white photograph of a young girl chagrined by an empty bird’s cage standing by her mother’s side, both elegantly dressed, in a conservative and luxurious setting.6 The feminized sentimentality of the photograph is reinforced by the soft focus and contrived pose. The photomontage of the Blackshirt, on the other hand, was constructivist in style. Although socialist realist and constructivist styles predominated in Italian documentary photography from the 1930s, the ambiguous relationship Fascism established with Communism complicated the visual ideal the regime wanted to promote. The avant-garde working in photography was operating from a hybrid and unstable ideological platform in an attempt to forge a photographic genre inspired by a “Fascist spirit.” Bologna’s poster aestheticized and depoliticized a constructivist agitprop style, packaging it as a military call to arms. This “false constructivism” was an indirect reference to the Bolshevik Revolution, which justified the Fascist one as a political revolution. Hoisting his rifle, the Blackshirt in Bologna’s poster represents power and virility as he gazes toward an abstract expansionist future. The poster has been reproduced countless times, annihilating Bologna’s “genteel” past in histories of Italian photography and at auction houses. The shift in style arguably exemplifies a shift in popular taste, from the cultured bourgeois interior to violence, action, and the outdoors. Mussolini was driving at breaking with conservative forces and tradition, declaring that for the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution he wanted “to make something of the now, therefore hypermodern, and audacious, without melancholic memories of the decorative styles of the past.”7 A parallel can be drawn to Stalin’s use of Gesamtkunstwerk, which endorsed the modernist Soviet project.8

This chapter begins by introducing the regime’s attitude toward image propaganda and manipulation in order to understand the contradiction that existed between Fascist rural photography and the potentially antifascist documentation of an underworld, in which peasants practiced “primitive” rituals while existing in difficult living conditions. I examine the way in which the image of the peasant was manipulated within a system in which governmental and para-governmental corporations dominated the representation of rural life. Fascist photographic aesthetics featured “new” healthy peasants who had adopted Fascist rituals as though they belonged to an ancient existing folklore. The regime needed to validate ruralism, and yet it wished to eliminate what it saw as its negative, “backward” aspects such as superstitious behavior or abject poverty. The idea of a simple, strong, and humble people working in the Italian countryside was used to enhance a eugenic discourse on the Italian “race” and style: art, film, photography, and fashion were some of the main vehicles through which the message of a progressive peasantry was transferred.

A shift in photographic styles and subjects is examined through a transition phase in the late 1930s, when Fascist intellectuals as well as critical Fascists and antifascists began searching for greater realism, particularly in cinema and literature. This resulted in a return to nineteenth-century painterly concerns with the proletariat and Giovanni Verga’s novels, as well as to 1930s American Depression literature, film, and photography. Realism’s potential was explored in certain periodicals that the regime tolerated as well as in exhibitions it fully endorsed, such as Giuseppe Pagano’s Exhibition of Rural Architecture in the Mediterranean Basin (Mostra dell’Architettura Rurale nel Bacino del Mediterraneo) at the VI Milan Triennial in 1936. The journalist Leo Longanesi’s interest in realism, which became apparent in his periodicals L’Italiano and Omnibus, contributed to a desire to understand who the Italians were, from the peasants and working classes to the bourgeois and the aristocrats. A number of photographs of peasant religious rituals, however, remained unpublished until after 1945, at times emerging only from the 1970s onward. Censored, eliminated, or not considered for publication because of their “depressing” subject matter, these photographs lived parallel lives, while others remained undeveloped or were seen by very few people because the negatives had deteriorated over time. This was arguably due to their antifascist nature, as explored in the last part of the chapter. The silenced photographic legacy of the “real” peasantry reveals the way in which the carnivalesque and folklore, in life-affirming religious rituals or street life, had been suppressed in favor of a hygienist, modernist, imperialist vision of rural life. This vision is further validated with reference to nineteenth-century paintings and Giovanni Verga and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s literary interests in “primitivism” and peasant life. At a time of emerging anthropological interests elsewhere, pioneered by Georges Henri Rivière in France and the opening of the Musée des arts et traditions populaires in 1938 in Paris, Italian photographers were revealing a forgotten world of pagan rituals and animal worship that would not be considered of real interest until much later.

Forging a “New” Peasant at the Istituto LUCE and Other Fascist organizations

Ruralism and peasants were the founding pillars of the Fascist regime and acknowledged as such by Mussolini. In his ascension speech in 1927, he proclaimed the need for Italians to have children and live in the countryside:

There is a kind of urban life, which is destructive and sterilizes the population. This is industrial, urban life. . . . But do you believe that when I talk of ruralisation in Italy I talk for love of fine sentences, which I detest? No! . . . If we diminish, gentlemen, we do not build an Empire, we become a colony! . . . You understand now why I help agriculture, why I proclaim myself rural.9

In a speech in Naples in 1931, he used the socialist notion of going to the people (andata al popolo), an idea recuperated from the nineteenth-century Russian socialist movement of the Narodniks (Populists) or intellectuals who tried to liberate the serfs by campaigning in the Russian countryside.10

The socialist-ruralist campaign that underlay the grand Fascist project was reinforced by large-scale documentary projects. Attempts at photographically connecting the disparate regional Italies were centralized under the regime to expose the nation’s unified progress, interregional connectivity, and North-South collaboration. Although Gramsci had identified Mussolini’s form of Fascism as “urban, petit bourgeois and collaborationist” compared to a form of Fascism that was “agrarian, connected to the capitalism of land and intransigent” in 1921, Mussolini, by 1927, was advocating agrarian Fascism in the name of the empire.11 Some of the major policy changes undertaken by the regime concerned agricultural activity: the “Battle of the Grain” in 1925 increased tariffs on foreign grain to protect Italian wheat growers; ruralization, after 1927, attempted to stimulate birth rates in rural areas and called for a return to the land; in 1929, the land reclamation program aimed at exploiting previously unproductive land, or land that had been abandoned during mass emigration at the end of the nineteenth century.12

Photography participated in an imperialist, aggrandizing discourse of the peasantry by dissimulating their physical, social, and political oppression with images of cheerful and healthy laborers. One of the major organs to promote this confident image was the LUCE Institute, which had begun as a private film production company in 1924 and was co-opted by the regime in 1925.13 It was set up as a didactic tool for the indoctrination of the people through propaganda newsreels projected before feature films at cinemas (cinegiornali). By 1927, it opened a photographic department, which became the official photographic branch of the Fascist regime. Its work went into a wide variety of publications, from newspapers to magazines, photography books, and exhibition catalogues, including the previously mentioned photomontages and catalogues published for the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. The so-called “eye of the regime” was the first creation of a systematic “institutional” image in Italy, similar to the Soviet Narkompros and mirroring the Communist International (Comintern) organization.14 In 1929, the dictator pronounced the LUCE the “only photographic organ of the State for the official documentation of national events.”15 LUCE photographs were supplied to national periodicals, agencies, institutes, and ministries, and participated in international photographic exchanges.

The LUCE was a major organ of centralization of power through the control of image production and the elimination of an authorial voice: the Institute’s photographers remained anonymous, working under the corporate logo. Many were not professional, with a large number employed through nepotism.16 The anonymity of the LUCE photographers corresponded to Mussolini’s desire to achieve a “collective significance of life.” The following is what he told a German interviewer, Emil Ludwig, in 1932:

Here, as in Russia, we are advocates of the collective significance of life, and we wish to develop this at the cost of individualism. . . . Herein may be recognised a very remarkable advance in national psychology, for it has been made by one of the Mediterranean peoples, who have hitherto been considered [unfit] for anything of the kind. A sense of [collective living] is the new spell that is working among us.17

This idea acquired a photographic dimension in Fascist Italy on the March (L’Italia Fascista in Cammino), one of the most referenced photobooks from this era published in 1932 by the LUCE Institute.18 It was captioned in Italian, French, English, Spanish, and German. In the Duce’s words, it was meant to “show the world what the Blackshirts have achieved in all areas of activity.”19

Reflecting what Susan Sontag identified in both Fascist and Communist art as “tastes for the monumental and for mass obeisance to the hero,” L’Italia Fascista in Cammino features 516 photographs.20 A selection of photographs emphasizes the social priorities of the Fascist regime: schoolchildren segregated by gender are pictured in neat attentive rows, while on a separate page a row of female factory workers in uniform are breastfeeding their babies from their left breast in unnatural military synchronicity (Figure 1.3). Ideals of progress were translated through photographs of physical labor and fitness, clustered according to topics such as fertility, education, sports, architecture, and agricultural, military, or industrial power. Photographs of synchronized activities in uniform contributed to eliminating a sense of individuality while simultaneously disproving national Italian stereotypes in existence since the clichés established by Grand Tour tourists. The nameless proletariat, expressionless Blackshirts, and workers were being documented at the time when Achille Starace became Party Secretary for the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista—PNF), bringing in Fascist uniforms, the Roman military step, mass rallies, military maneuvers, and rows of choreographed gymnasts.21 Peasants were presented as smiling, handsome, and willing agricultural laborers, crucial elements to the smooth functioning of the system. Fascist photographic subjects, like their Soviet counterparts, reflected a sense of hope and prosperity. Despite the fact that Italy was hit by the crisis of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and consequent global depression, national photographic production, whether governmental or vernacular, did not reflect the reality of unemployment, undernourishment, or poverty.22 The centralized propaganda effort in photography could be described as a buoyant and deluded version of American Depression photography, which instead had to respond to an urgent public need to be told the “truth” about the nation’s bleak realities.23

FIGURE 1.3 School room (Interno di una scuola), L’Italia Fascista in Cammino, 1932. Source: Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.

Numerous governmental and para-governmental organizations other than the Istituto LUCE, as well as private photographic agencies, participated in taking and distributing documentary photographs that reinforced a progressive perspective on Italians and rural life. Some of the main commercial agencies were VEDO, founded by Adolfo Porry-Pastorel in 1908, and Keystone, founded by Vincenzo Carrese and Fedele Toscani in 1934 and subsequently renamed Publifoto from 1936 due to increased totalitarian pressure to Latinize Italian vocabulary. In a photograph by Porry-Pastorel from 1931, ten naked boys stand in a row, their hands straight down along their sides, like miniature soldiers, their bellies poignantly protruding (Figure 1.4). These were the Fascist, militarized equivalent of the boy scouts, the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB). The photograph sits in a strange zone: the orderly balilla might have appealed to a Fascist sensibility, and yet their vulnerability makes a mockery of it. Porry-Pastorel was known to have maintained an ambiguous, tense rapport with the regime and Mussolini himself.24

FIGURE 1.4 Adolfo Porry-Pastorel, Rome. 31 August 1931. New ONB recruits in an Opera Nazionale Balilla campsite on the periphery of the capital (Roma, 3 agosto 1931. Nuove reclute dell’Opera Nazionale Balilla in un campeggio dell’Opera Nazionale Balilla alla periferia della capitale), T. Farabola, Farabola: un archivio italiano (Milan, 1980), p. 14.

Various organizations such as the National Organization of Leisure Time (Opera Nazionale del Dopolavoro known as the OND), founded in 1925, and the Touring Club Italiano (TCI) would include photography as part of their activities. By 1940, the OND had four million members, including workers, employees, and peasants, making it the biggest Fascist expression of mass culture.25 Aside from photography lessons, it was the seat for activities such as choir-singing, housekeeping courses, theater lessons, and folkloric events. The photographs circulated widely and in ways that are hard to trace: they may have been kept for family albums, published in factory periodicals (such as FIAT Dopolavoro) or in vernacular exhibition catalogues and competitions organized by the Union of Italian Societies for Photographic Art (Unione società italiana arte fotografica—USIAF).

The Institute of Agrarian Technique and Propaganda (Istituto di tecnica e propaganda agrari) produced a large body of work—now held in the vaults of the Ministry of Agriculture—that acted as a systematic documentation of agrarian activities in Italy in the late 1930s.26 The Ministry of Agriculture also embarked on a major illustrated book project entitled The Agricultural Face of Italy (Il volto agricolo dell’Italia) which was edited by the Undersecretary, Arturo Marescalchi.27 Funded and published by the TCI in two volumes between 1936 and 1938, it described Italy’s regions from the North to the South according to the qualities of their culinary specialties, animals, and inhabitants, and with many photographs, combining the promotion of agriculture and tourism in an innovative format. The photographs were uncredited, except those of professional photographers Achille Bologna, Stefano Bricarelli, and Lucio Ridenti. Ridenti was primarily a fashion photographer, who received a number of “agrarian” commissions, including an article in Tempo on rice-pickers. Modeled on Life magazine (1936) and using similar graphics for the cover page, Tempo was at the photographic avant-garde and is considered by some scholars to have promoted “neorealist” photography despite its outright support of the Fascist government.28 The tone of Ridenti’s caption betrays a distinctly patronizing attitude toward the rice-pickers: “Rice, for rice-pickers, is habitual food. But judging by these girls’ healthy aspect, it is also certainly their favourite” (Figure 1.5).29 Throughout the article, the hard labor of the rice-pickers is systematically overshadowed by accounts of their joyous disposition and the fun had in between (eating, reading letters, bathing after work). Ridenti also appears to have selected mainly young, attractive rice-pickers to illustrate his article. The reality was very different: in 1931 their dreadful working conditions had pushed them to go on an illegal strike, mid-economic crisis, paralyzing work in the countryside. The strikes took place partly due to the distribution of the subversive Communist newspaper Risaia in the Vercelli region; the articles in the newspaper pointed out that the Fascist owners of the rice farms were feasting on steak and certainly were not forced to eat a diet of rice and polenta everyday like the rice-pickers.30 The brutal aspects of the work were ignored in regime-friendly photographs in mainstream press like Tempo, for which rice-pickers represented the possibility of autarky: as a nationally produced staple food, rice symbolized Italy’s capacity to be economically self-sufficient.31 Documentary photography served as a vehicle through which to create a sense of visual empowerment through the documentation of the Italian countryside and well-fed, well-dressed, “new” peasants. Toward the end of the 1930s, a contradictory attitude toward progress and tradition began emerging in Fascist periodicals and amateur photography catalogues, as a consequence of the increase in nationalism and territorial expansion. The repertoire of nostalgic kitsch photographs of rural life grew in totalitarian regimes such as Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union, and parts of Central Europe in the 1930s as a reactionary movement against technology and urban dystopia.32

FIGURE 1.5 Luciano Ridenti, Rice is wheat (Il riso è frumento), Tempo, 8 (July 20, 1939), pp. 12–17. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Comunale Centrale “Palazzo Sormani,” Milan.

Rural kitsch, fashion, and the Nazi-Fascist alliance

Toward the end of the 1930s, peasant folklore began to seem like a lifestyle choice rather than an enforced condition, particularly for women. Already in the early 1920s, TCI’s small-format monthly Le Vie d’Italia had established a competition for folkloristic photographs, which was awarded a prize and a full-page publication. These tended to feature scenes stopped in time, often of women posing in traditional costume, spinning wool, or gathering water from the village fountain.33 As the ruralist drive gathered strength, these a-chronological scenes began seeming increasingly contemporary, to the point of endorsing folkloric costumes as a mark of avant-garde fashion. Scanno, a village in the Abruzzi region renowned for maintaining traditional ways of life and costumes, was featured in L’Italia Fascista in Cammino and in other publications such as Le Vie d’Italia in 1926 and L’Illustrazione Fascista in 1928, all of which suggested the garb of Scanno’s inhabitants as the latest in fashion trends.34 Documentary photography promoted peasant traditions in the name of creating a new political conscience and style, while fashion photography in women’s magazines idealized rural dress and textiles that recreated antique, ornamental peasant brocades.

Women’s fashion was a particular target for the ambiguous style the regime sought to impose. An article from 1938 describing the New Women of Orvieto in Tempo magazine combines a series of black-and-white photographs of women in sports outfits performing synchronized movements in Soviet Fizkultura style next to a color photograph of a model in a Dirndl-style dress standing next to a spray of bright pink flowers (Figure 1.6). The use of color photography had begun to spread in photojournalism and advertising with the introduction of the 35mm Kodachrome color transparency roll film in 1936 and was a sign of wealth due to its expense. The article integrates a typical contradictory mixture of progressive ideas about women’s physical liberation and a throwback to a bygone era with the peasant dress code working as a nostalgic referral to an undefined past, envisioned as the future. Paradoxically, the “peasant past” is in “futuristic” color, while the highly contemporary synchronized sports are in black and white. The Dirndl dress in the Tempo photograph would have been a sign of the Nazi-Fascist alliance, which grew after the Spanish Civil War, when Mussolini, like Hitler, sent weapons, aircraft, and men to support Franco’s Nationalists in 1936. This marked the beginning of the Rome-Berlin Axis, anticipated by a bilateral commercial accord signed on September 26, 1934.35 In 1936, it became a “politicization of trade” and was named the “Axis,” increasing reciprocal economic relations as well as political and cultural exchanges. With regard to photography, the alliance was accompanied by an increase in kitsch subject matter, the presence of which in German culture was famously explored in Clement Greenberg’s seminal essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939).36 For example, toward the end of the 1930s, USIAF exhibition catalogues featured saccharine photographs of alpine landscapes, blond children, and animals accompanied by titles such as “Smile,” “Maternal Love,” “Waiting for the Fish,” “Little Housewife,” etc.37 From 1934, the German travel writer Louise Diel published a number of books on Italy, using a combination of “scenic” tourist shots of fishmongers or peasants, as well as photographs sourced from LUCE archives portraying women at work or children’s holiday camps, thus indirectly promoting a Fascist “culture of consent” as well as Fascist rural romanticism through the female figure.38 After 1940, the USIAF worked in conjunction with the Reichsbund Deutscher Amateur-Fotografen E.V. based in Berlin, reinforcing the Nazi-Fascist alliance in the production of national visual culture.

FIGURE 1.6 Anon., New Women of Orvieto (Donne Nuove a Orvieto), Tempo, 10 (August 3, 1939), pp. 10–14. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Comunale Centrale “Palazzo Sormani,” Milano.

This sentimentalizing photography, however, must be differentiated from the throwback to pictorialism that occurred in the work of some photographers in the 1920s and 1930s. While pre- and postwar photography critics in Italy wrote negatively about pictorialism in an attempt to free the medium from what they regarded as its inferiority complex to painting, in the Italian case, the genre can be connected to an antifascist, albeit conservative, stance. A photographer like Domenico Riccardi Peretti Griva—a Torinese magistrate, photographer, and antifascist—experimented with the pictorialist style in photographs of peasants and the petty bourgeoisie in opposition to the regime’s modernizing drive (Figure 1.7). The similarities in the choice of subject between Madre (ante 1933) and Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother (1939) highlight how Peretti Griva sought to capture humble people in “soft” poses, angles, and lighting without representing an “empowered,” futuristic Fascist style. In fact, one of the first exhibitions in which this photograph featured was the International Exhibition of Photography held by the Twickenham Photographic Society in 1939, a sign of its cosmopolitan, and potentially antifascist, appeal. Fascist photography, on the other hand, aimed to represent ruralism as modernism. The Fascist photographer Mario Bellavista epitomized the state of ruralist photography in a 1938 USIAF catalogue: “Peasant folklore with a modern touch brings us back to the traditions of our valleys.”39 Costumes tended to be modeled on medieval designs and festivities that had never existed in the name of an ideal popular ruralism often unrelated to the superstitions and religious rituals practiced in contemporary peasant culture.40 The split identity of the Fascist aesthetic between an agrarian past and a machinist future was based on a complex combination of romanità, ruralism, and modernity, made explicit at the first Milan Triennial in 1933. In the next section, I look at the way in which Italian art photography was carving out a position for itself between 1930 and 1933, when Mussolini had absorbed the photography-based aesthetic as part of a wider nationalist move to validate Italy’s position in the world political arena.

FIGURE 1.7 Domenico Riccardo Peretti Griva, Mother (Madre), ante-1933, silver bromide gelatin transferred onto paper, Coll. Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Fondo M. T. Peretti Griva and G. Galante Garrone, Turin.

The Fascist avant-garde and the international photographic context

Just as documentary photography promoted an idealized vision of the Fascist regime, art photography emerged in new and progressive forms: the futurists Tato and Marinetti exhumed futurist photography—which had had its moment of glory with the Bragaglia brothers in the 1910s—under the guise of the Manifesto of Futurist Photography in 1930. Its modernist call to arms to superimpose, interpenetrate, and fuse angles, planes, and tones evolving toward a “photographic science in pure art” was followed by the first National Exhibition of Photographic Art in 1932 at the Aranciera of Villa Borghese organized by the newly set up and lengthily named National Fascist Community of Italian Photographers Under the Auspices of the Autonomous Fascist Federation for Artisans of Italy.41 Italian periodicals specializing in photography promoted experimental styles, similar to the kind focused on in the groundbreaking exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart in 1929. The German exhibition had determined the latest trends in photography, with, among others, still life photographs by Man Ray and Edward Weston. It also featured a strong Communist presence, with Soviet Worker Photography, a room dedicated to Communist artist John Heartfield’s antifascist photomontages and an adjacent room designed by El Lissitzky featured work by Alexsandr Rodchenko and Gustav Klucis. The Comintern exerted an important influence on photography in European and American avant-gardes, particularly in Germany and France. In 1925, the Comintern Director of Operations, Willi Münzenberg, who also masterminded the German left-wing periodical AIZ, published a call for photography that would represent “proletarian everyday life and the objective conditions of industrial labour.”42 In 1930, AIZ recruited Heartfield as full-time staff, although the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, the magazine was suppressed. As a result, many Berlin-based photojournalists went into exile in France, Britain, and the United States, including, for example, the Hungarian Jewish intellectual Stefan Lorant, who fled to London where he founded Lilliput in 1934, an antifascist magazine about art, literature, and politics.

Worker Photography celebrated the power of the Worker’s Movement, but was also used as an indictment against the squalid living conditions of the poor. In France, the periodicals Vu and Regards pioneered antifascist sentiment through an innovative use of photography. Regards employed photojournalists of the caliber of David Seymour (Chim), “an intellectual and a humanist with a social conscience,” and a future cofounder of Magnum, who believed that photojournalism would help redress social inequalities.43 Brassaï’s celebrated 1933 book Paris By Night (Paris de nuit), from which a number of photographers were republished in Vu, featured transvestites, prostitutes and the nightlife of working-class bars. Photographers like Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson, who was also published in Vu, were seeking a new photographic language, eschewing the predominance of experimental modernism.44 Lucien Vogel ran Vu from 1928 to 1936, maintaining a distinctly antifascist line and making use of photography in radical and stylish ways, promoting humorous and poetic visual associations of street life, the everyday, and the Worker’s Movement. In the United States, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project began in 1935 and the Photo League was founded in 1936 in New York (among its members were Paul Strand and Berenice Abbott), marking the formalization of a left-wing cooperative based on the Communist Worker’s Camera League.45

No Italian photographers had been included in Film und Foto possibly due to the fact that, until the early 1930s, photography did not feature as a prominent expression of national visual culture, whether in the guise of art or documentary photography. Shortly before Münzenberg called for photography to “capture the beauty of labor itself and also the horrors of social misery,” Mussolini was eliminating any comparable Italian Socialist or Communist voices.46 Pronounced sole leader of a single-party state in 1925, after a Fascist squadron had brutally murdered his opponent, the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, the Duce sought to harness a powerful, invincible image for Fascism in which there was no room for the opposition. On November 5, 1926, Mussolini declared the PCI, formed on January 21, 1921, illegal. Italian Communists were forced into exile, with many of them headed to Paris.47 When the activity of the Worker’s Photography Movement was at its peak elsewhere, the PCI lived through its most difficult years, those which historian Paolo Spriano called “the clandestine years,” extending from 1926 to 1935.

Subversive Communist activities to infiltrate the profascist consensus and stranglehold on power increased during these years. According to Aldo Agosti, the PCI did so by highlighting “the contradictions between the demagogic declarations of the regime and the persistently miserable conditions and exploitation of a substantial section of the Italian population.”48 Agosti does not detail the PCI’s methods for bringing these contradictions to light, mentioning a vague and unreferenced “painstakingly detailed analysis.” Arguably, some of these attempts “at highlighting contradictions” can be traced in the “hidden” documentary photographic culture of the 1930s. Research into this, however, is complicated by the fact that Italian photographers who may have been inclined to take “antifascist” photographs had no organ in which to publish. On July 9, 1924, Mussolini, once a journalist himself, silenced all periodicals that were not directly funded by Fascists with a law declaring that any paper containing false information that obstructed the diplomatic activities of the government would be removed from circulation.49 At the international press exhibition, Pressa, in Cologne in 1928, Fascist squadrons tore down the Exhibition of the Italian Antifascist Press (Exposition de la presse antifasciste italienne) the night before the opening. Undeterred, the Union des journalistes antifascistes italiens “G. Amendola” set the exhibition up again. Its accompanying catalogue reminded the reader of the intellectual martyrs of antifascism like Giorgio Amendola, Giacomo Matteotti, and Piero Gobetti, and their “resurrection” through clandestine Italian press abroad.50 Italians abroad had contacts with the Worker Photography Movement, including the Stalinist Tina Modotti, a representative of the Comintern who published in Der Arbeiter-Fotograf and AIZ in Berlin, and Francesco Misiano, who organized the Comintern cinema enterprise in Moscow from 1924—Mezrabpom.51 In France, connections between humanism, Communism, and Marxism were more easily made, and made public, than in Fascist Italy. This was owing to the visibility and cultural standing of the French Communist Party (PCF) that increased dramatically between 1933 and 1936. The social utopia of egalitarianism and human dignity was based on Marxist humanism and supported by influential authors like André Gide, Romain Rolland, and André Malraux, who gave Communism a powerful intellectual and cultural position. In the United States under the democrats, photographers like Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, or Walker Evans who worked for the FSA produced a vast photographic archive of the very people and scenes the Fascist regime avoided portraying: breadlines, refugees, and starving men, women, and children living in the Dust Bowl, dressed in rags. FSA photographs were reproduced in some of the main periodicals such as Life, Time, and the New York Times Magazine, purposefully reaching a wide and cultured readership. In Italy, there was no equivalent to the Worker Photography presented at Film und Foto or to FSA photography.

The photographic avant-garde in Italy was afforded its greatest expression at the Milan Triennials. Born from the Monza Biennial for Decorative Arts (Biennale delle arti decorative di Monza), the V Milan Triennial in 1933 was in fact the first chapter of the Milan Triennals. It had been moved to Milan as part of a huge artistic manifestation of the regime which included painting, sculpture, journalism, photography, and most importantly, murals by Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Giorgio De Chirico, Massimo Campigli, and Gino Severini.52 These were in line with a Fascist artistic language based on the “return to order” that took place in the visual arts in Europe after the First World War, in which Italian artists like Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà played a leading role.53 European avant-gardes resurrected realism and classicism as part of a return to tradition and purity, a scenario in which, as argued by art historian Romy Golan, Sironi’s supposed archaism and “timelessness,” which earned him a position among the “conflicted and disenchanted modernists” was in fact very timely in terms of Mussolini’s desire to “restore Italian grandeur.”54 The main display echoed the Fascist dichotomy between progress and tradition, allowing the visitor to choose between two itineraries: one with frescoes “representing scenes of wine-grape gathering and bread baking” and the other, the exhibition of transportation.55

Within the V Milan Triennial, the Pavilion of the Press also featured the First International Photographic Exhibition, which concerned “the work of men” and was organized, among others, by Giò Ponti, architect, designer, and founder of the avant-garde architectural monthly Domus (1928).56 It included international names (Erna Lendvai-Dircksen and Cartier-Bresson) and Italian ones (Pasquale De Antonis, Achille Bologna, and Stefano Bricarelli).57 The shifting styles used among Italian photographers (constructivist, futurist, or Neue Sachlichkeit), however, left critics dissatisfied with the lack of a clear national, Fascist style of photography. Essays published in photography periodicals such as Domus (1928—present), Fotografia (1932–33) and Galleria (1933–39) argued for an innovative, internationally competitive Italian style.58 In line with the nation’s photographic revolution, Giò Ponti challenged Italian photographers and publishers to compete with their international counterparts.59 Ponti, who had launched Fotografia—a monthly that appeared as a supplement to Domus only eight times—remarked on the power of photography to shape people’s imaginations: “So many and how many things appear to us in the shape of photography, and thereby simply are! The photographic aberration is for many things our reality: and it constitutes our knowledge of many things, and therefore also our judgement.”60

The VI Milan Triennial in 1936 featured a much more significant photographic exhibition subsumed under a ruralist theme: the Exhibition of Rural Architecture in the Mediterranean Basin. Organized by the Rationalist architect and photographer Giuseppe Pagano, coeditor with Edoardo Persico on the architecture magazine Casabella, and the German Werner Daniel, this nationwide photography project revisited opinions on “primitive” peasant dwellings, demonstrating the inherent modernist spirit in which they were constructed.61 As observed by Lindsay Harris, the photographic display of regular 6 × 6 Rolleiflex prints hung at eye level and in sequence around the exhibition space of the Triennial, accentuated the design similarities between different regional dwellings, from Alpine huts to trulli in Puglia.62 Rural architecture was exalted as a feature of Italian landscapes that connected peasants in their natural genius from the South to the North, although the peasants themselves and their living conditions, which saw many not have basic housing amenities like running water, were ignored. The photographic document was void of the human presence, creating an anonymous, uninhabited collective through architectural traces. These would be published by Hoepli the same year as the exhibition in a photobook imitating the square format of the photographs and titled Italian Rural Architecture (Architettura Rurale Italiana).63 Pagano and Daniel’s project exemplified the search for a primitive modernism, pertaining to the Fascist search for a progressive ruralism, as well as contributing an important voice to the growing interest in “primitivism,” which began to increasingly preoccupy critical intellectuals in the late 1930s.

Critical Fascists and the concept of the “Primitive”

Despite the increasingly repressive autarchic measures of the Fascist government, cosmopolitan Italian intellectuals and artists working in film, photography, and publishing were aware of, and interested in, 1930s realist American literature as well as FSA photography. These bearers of an alternative political consciousness surfaced as inspiration in the mid- to late-1930s for a way out of the stale bureaucracy of the regime. They were not “left-wing fascists” (fascisti di sinistra), who included artists and men of culture like Attilio Calzavara, Vinicio Paladini (a member of the Comintern), Umberto Barbaro, and Marcello Gallian.64 Instead, they were later called “critical Fascists.” After 1936, which corresponded to the most repressive period of the regime—the period after the colonial conquest of Abyssinia—they began sowing doubt about the regime’s monocultural aesthetic of increasing artificiality and kitsch. In contrast, they sought to establish a collective sense of engagement with the aim of cultivating a more realist aesthetic. The photography that issued from this undefined critical Fascist movement has often been treated as “proto-neorealist.” I argue that this idea simplifies a more sinuous or flexible state of mind, whereby many Fascists who were critical of the regime still believed in the ideals of Fascist politics and in an associated idea of Italianità. 65

This critical spirit began emerging along with a dissatisfaction with the establishment, which became an “irritated existentialism” among young intellectuals who wanted to undercut its grand totalizing project. Following the last and VII congress of the III Comintern in 1935, Luigi Longo led some 3,800 Italian Communists to join the international brigades in the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).66 Concomitantly, critical Fascists began looking to nineteenth-century literature such as Giovanni Verga’s social novels and the idea of the peasantry as the core of an unacknowledged Italianità that had remained underexposed. Anticonformist platforms flourished, expressing the need for a new realist vision to authentically represent life. This wave of revolt swept through the young Fascist intellectuals, and was given a voice in some avant-garde periodicals and by a gallery, La Cometa, founded in 1935 by the Jewish countess Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt, who was married to New York banker Cecil Blunt. Her pioneering gallery prophetically launched the careers of renowned postwar artists Renato Guttuso, Corrado Cagli, and Mirko Basaldella. La Cometa also raised its international profile when it opened a branch in New York in 1937. The gallery exhibited Carlo Levi’s paintings made during his exile as a political dissident in the south of Italy circa 1935–36, one of which would feature as the cover of his book that marked a generation, Christ Stopped at Eboli, examined in the third chapter (Figure 1.8).67

FIGURE 1.8 Carlo Levi, Child with goat’s head, (Bambino con testa di capretto), c.1935–1936, Christ Stopped at Eboli (Einaudi: Torino, 1945) © Carlo Levi, Raffealla Acetoso, by SIAE 2015.

La Cometa was rapidly closed down, however, in 1938 after the creation of the “Racial Laws,” forcing Jewish people to go into hiding or into exile.68 At the same time in Paris, the center of the international art world, Louis Aragon and Fernand Léger were disputing the idea of realism, torn between Communist Zhdanovian diktats declared during the Soviet Writers Congress in 1934 on socialist realist art and the “political role of photomontage” in La Querelle du Réalisme (“The Dispute Over Realism”).69 Discussions in the French art world would have had repercussions among the Italian avant-garde, which despite the prevailing autarchic mood, continued to create connections abroad. The late 1930s corresponded to an exciting intellectual period in film, literature, and photography that tends to be overlooked in favor of a clear demarcation of pre- and postwar tastes. Among the periodicals founded during this time, the ones that made the greatest use of documentary photography in artistic contexts included the bimonthly Cinema, directed by Vittorio Mussolini—one of Mussolini’s sons—from 1938 to 1942, Primato (1940–43), founded and directed by Giuseppe Bottai, Minister of Corporations who became Minister of National Education in 1936, and Documento, founded and directed by Federigo (Ghigo) Valli, from 1941 to 1943. These, among others, existed in a seeming cultural “no man’s land” tolerated by Mussolini, which arguably foregrounded the evolution of postwar humanist photography. Other periodicals that made innovative use of photography were Leo Longanesi’s L’Italiano, launched in 1926, and Omnibus in 1937, which issued one too many calumnies against the regime and was shut down in 1939.

Cinema was the news organ for the Experimental Film Centre (Centro Sperimentale di Cinema or CSC) created in 1935 and part of a cosmopolitan, avant-garde film and photography school that welcomed international exchanges. Vittorio Mussolini had connections with Hollywood through the film producer Hal Roach with whom he formed the production company Roach and Mussolini (RAM) Productions, appalling MGM from which Roach was forced to sever links. Antonioni, Visconti, and future Communists Mario Alicata and De Santis, who developed a vision of a new cinematic realism, were among Cinema’s authors.70 The French critic André Bazin who coined the term “neorealism” in film observed the remarkable advances of Italian Cinema under Fascism and attributed the successes of postwar neorealist film to the CSC.71 Cinema was published in a large magazine format and illustrated with black-and-white set photographs, news photographs, cartoons, and photographic portraits of actors and actresses. Vittorio Mussolini, like Bottai and Valli, was a Fascist who promoted an open-minded, liberal, and cosmopolitan Italian culture.

Bottai was an important and ambiguous cultural figure that challenged Fascist cultural and aesthetic conformism and autarchy.72 Founder and editor of the literary and artistic periodical Critica Fascista from 1923, he also founded the bimonthly Primato in 1940, an anticonformist periodical by Fascist standards. It contained articles and illustrations by future Communists or Communist sympathizers like Giulio Argan, Cesare Pavese, Cesare Zavattini, Ugo De Pisis, Corrado Cagli, and Renato Guttuso. A short story by Giuseppe Dessì was illustrated with two anonymous photographs in 1940 titled Monteponi Miners and Interior of a Shop in Macomer (Figure 1.9). The anonymity of photographs of the “everyday” reflects a consideration for an attempt at “a more real and human portrait of [a Sardinian] village” that sought not to embellish reality.73 A humanist-style photograph of two miners taking a break is placed next to a photograph of naïf-style graffiti that nearly appears to foreground postwar art brut. Similarly, Valli’s Documento published drawings by artists like Guttuso, De Pisis, and Capogrossi; short stories by Alberto Moravia and Alberto Savinio; as well as humanist-style photographs covered at the end of the chapter. Such photographic subjects, as well as the free visual associations, would have been unlikely in mainstream publications, and yet they point to the direction that a generation of thinkers was taking. The photography that participated in awakening a love of the “primitive” can be seen as part of a revolutionary impulse to return to different cultural roots than the Ancient Roman ones proposed by the regime.

FIGURE 1.9 Anon., Monteponi Miners (Minatori della Monteponi) and Interior of a shop in Macomer (Interno d’una bottega a Macomer), Giuseppe Dessì, “Appunti per un ritratto . . .,” Primato (April 1, 1940), pp. 2–3. Source: Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.

Leo Longanesi, D’Annunziano

Unlike the subversive or Communist periodicals published abroad like Lilliput, Vu, or AIZ, Italian intellectual photojournalism rarely used humor or irony. One of the most ambivalent figures to work in Italian journalism and use a humanist style of photography was Leo Longanesi, whose peculiar use of irony could simultaneously undermine and reinforce a message of oppression against the lower classes. This type of photography, which featured “primitive” scenes among others, treads an uncertain ideological path: it does not celebrate the lives of the peasants or the poor, but mocks everyone, from the working classes to the aristocrats. It was using photography of “social outsiders” for their contentiousness, in the same way as it used photography of “social insiders.”

Longanesi was also interested in the power of images and wrote on photography and cinema.74 In a long article titled “Aesthetics and the Crisis” (La crisi e l’estetica), Longanesi observed drily: “Crisis, something that means sad times, shortages, difficulties, efforts; serious motivations, therefore, that do not allow for luxuries, time-wasting, rhetoric, weakness, words; serious motivations like all those which are born of necessity, capable of breathing life into a morality and, even, into an aesthetic; poor motivations, with no artistic appeal, naked, raw and very powerful.”75 As Ruth Ben-Ghiat observes, Longanesi’s words expressed a “collective desire for engagement . . . associating decorativism with democratic decadence and self-indulgence.”76 On the other hand, Longanesi controversially also suggested defending the crisis, not trying to overcome this “difficult period, but to follow it right to the end,” observing that “crisis and fascism are not in conflict.”77 Two photographs of the Italian bourgeoisie ironically titled The Italians of the Crisis and The Real Italians illustrate the article, while the captions create new meaning (Figure 1.10). Longanesi’s call for an “anti-rhetorical and anti-ideological” aesthetic was subverted by his creation of what he called a “Barnum Museum”: an eight-page tribute to the “men, words and customs of a far-away Italy, happy, worldly and rhetorical” where the traitors of Cavour and Garibaldi “deserved to be placed next to the red flags at the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution.”78 Longanesi tread an ambiguous line, endorsing a number of ideological thrusts. Along with other eccentric intellectual figures examined further on, like Federigo Valli or Lamberti Sorrentino, Longanesi can be considered a so-called “D’Annunziano,” maintaining a proud yet critical attitude toward Italy and Italians.

FIGURE 1.10 Leo Longanesi, The Italians of the Crisis—Examples of Style (Gli italiani della crisi—Esempi di stile), L’Italiano (April 1932). Source: Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome.

The ideological and stylistic ambiguity of Longanesi’s position on the crisis and aesthetics was reflected in his political shifts between the 1920s and the 1940s, from Fascism to antifascism in 1943, and back to anti-antifascism, and therefore a conservative position, after 1945. He was part of the autarchic artistic-literary circle Strapaese and wrote for Mino Maccari’s homonymous magazine as well as his own, L’Italiano; Foglio mensile della Rivoluzione Fascista (The Italian: Monthly Paper for the Fascist Revolution) published from 1926 until 1942, and the right-wing publication L’Assalto, the organ of the Fascist federation of Bologna. At the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, Longanesi decorated the room recreating Mussolini’s study at home and his office at the newspaper Popolo d’Italia. In 1934, he coined the totalitarian catchphrase “Mussolini is always right” (Mussolini ha sempre ragione), which constituted one of the “Ten Commandments” of Fascism—the “Fascist Decalogue”—and was plastered over walls and monuments around the nation. Longanesi was a satirical journalist, author, painter, caricaturist, and publisher who both supported the regime and satirized it, exposing its contradictions. He wrote negatively about Fascism in his private diaries after 1938, when he began falling out of favor with Mussolini due to his successful but short-lived weekly Omnibus, although his diaries were not published until 1947. Longanesi, considered a “troublesome conservative,” lauded an idyllic “pre-political world” while promoting avant-garde American and European literature rivaling that promoted by intellectual antifascists.79

With all the above information, it becomes more difficult to categorize the politics underlying the publication of humanist material in Longanesi’s periodicals. While some scholars have tended to group Longanesi’s photographic contribution to Italian visual culture as antifascist and concerned with the margins, others like Gabriele D’Autilia have allowed his political ambiguity to emerge and his intent to develop an eccentric, elitist, artistic expression in his publications.80 Longanesi’s relentless use of irony counteracts the pathos that may have emerged in some of the photographs considered “neorealist.” Peasants or poorly dressed people pose outside a house, although the photograph is inserted along with three reproductions of works by Van Gogh in a fictional story titled “The Custodian of Napoleon’s house” by Stella Nera (Black Star) (Figure 1.11).81 The photograph is not titled, described, or mentioned. An eclectic array of peasants stare out at the camera: a large woman with a naked baby over her shoulder, a thin woman in overalls, a man in breeches and a bow tie. The story is about the return of a Corsican to his town aged sixty-five, after fighting in the war, and his desire in his old age to no longer be humiliated or have to follow anyone’s orders. As the custodian of Napoleon’s house he could recreate his own little empire: the photograph may have been placed there to illustrate the way in which the man in a bow tie is sitting among peasants, where he perhaps once belonged. The irreverence of the naked baby’s bottom stands out of the photograph as though signaling a sense of humor that undercuts any earnest social concern with the peasants’ lives. Other photographs used to describe the beginnings of neorealism in Longanesi’s periodical were part of a special double issue on film, in which Longanesi’s main idea came from a nationalist need to create an “Italian Film.”82 He was not merely protesting against the regime by publishing photographs that did not appear to celebrate Fascist optimism. Italians, according to Longanesi, needed an identity, which he wanted to fashion in his own ideal image. This image, while politically ambiguous, relied on intellectualism and irony as its fail-safe. Longanesi was similarly patronizing toward the middle classes who took the waters at Montecatini looking sad and bored in the article “The Melancholy of Montecatini.”83

FIGURE 1.11 Anon./Leo Longanesi, Untitled, in The Custodian of Napoleon’s House (“Il custode della casa di Napoleone”) di Stella Nera, L’Italiano, a. 7 n. 16 (December 1932). Source: Biblioteca nazionale di Roma.

Longanesi’s mission was to rid Italians of their provincialisms, and one of his methods was by paradoxically indulging “an excess of provincialism, as a sort of poisonous antidote to an even more powerful poison.”84 His imagined documentary was titled “Anonymous Lives” (“La vita degli anonimi”) sounding like a neorealist film, and yet he ended his article protesting against the need to show the truth.85 He was interested in stalking “the man on the street,” and eavesdropping on snippets of conversations, without uncovering the reality of the characters he might film. It is difficult to place Longanesi in the history of humanist photography because of the ambiguities of his persona, which are reflected in the contexts in which he published. Because of his “problematic” nature, scholars have not necessarily discussed his contribution to photography transparently. Longanesi defied traditional Italian journalism and the Fascist regime with surreal, humorous, and ironic juxtapositions between photographs and words to illustrate ideas. His use of photography filled the satirical void in Fascist press, but it did not do so with the social radicalism of AIZ or Vu, pioneering instead a peculiarly “Italian” intellectual and surrealist style of photojournalism. This style influenced the use of photography in the prestigious postwar periodical Il Mondo (1949–66) directed by Mario Pannunzio, one of Longanesi’s collaborators on L’Italiano and Omnibus, examined in Chapter 4. In these publications, which prized irony above all, the image did not necessarily need to correspond directly to the contents of the article. This system created a knowing distance with the article it illustrated and a photographic taste that privileged a detachment from reality, focusing on the surreal aspects of daily life from which the wider political picture might be empirically deduced. One of the reasons behind Longanesi’s annexation to the “neorealist” or humanist genre is because of his collaboration with photographer Cesare Barzacchi, which Ennery Taramelli explores in Viaggio nell’Italia del Neorealismo (Figure 1.12). From the 1930s to the mid-1960s Longanesi and Barzacchi were a team to the extent that some photographs are credited with both names in recent publications, with Longanesi relying on Barzacchi to capture unusual street scenes around Rome.86 Barzacchi’s street photography of the marginalized, however, remained for the most part unpublished, even in Longanesi’s periodical. In the next section, I examine photographs of what might be termed “non-Fascist” cultures, like gypsies and peasants, as well as the periodicals in which they were published.

FIGURE 1.12 Cesare Barzacchi, Leo Longanesi, 1942 © Marco Barzacchi.

Non-Fascist cultures and “Primitive” rituals

A carefree shot, Barzacchi’s Little Gypsy Girl and Parrot (Zingarella e Pappagallo) from 1938 portrayed a little girl laughing and balancing on one of the caravan’s shafts, about to stroke a parrot (Figure 1.13). This photograph was published in Mario Pannunzio and Arrigo Benedetti’s short-lived weekly Oggi: settimanale di attualità e letteratura (1939–42) along with one titled Village Fête (Fiera in Paese), which is also credited to Barzacchi.87 The accompanying article signed by “Celestino,” possibly a pseudonym, at first appears to be a melancholic, somewhat ineffectual description of Anzio in the autumn where nothing happens, and everything is still. As the essay progresses, however, the author makes minute observations about the way the locals are living: a cook is anxious to not lose a “milligram of [potato] flesh,” while a sailor hangs on to insignificant fragments of firewood.88 Then, in a few sentences that could easily have been overlooked by a reader too bored to persevere, the soldiers who are “king” arrive and help themselves to copious servings of food meant for the poor inhabitants.89 Three months later, the periodical was closed down for its antifascist content. The image of the gypsy corresponds to the Longanesian style of journalism: the photograph accompanying the article did not need to reflect its contents.

FIGURE 1.13 Cesare Barzacchi, Little Gypsy Girl and Parrot (Zingarella e pappagallo), 1938 © Marco Barzacchi.

Gypsies would have been recognized as pertaining to antifascism: Barzacchi took the photograph in 1938, the year that the “Racial Laws” were issued (the laws , in 1940, were extended to include gypsies [zingari]).90 The law-decreed gypsies were a dangerous people due to the “serious crimes” they committed and because of their capacity to undertake “antinational activities.”91 Gypsies represented a subculture compared to the mainstream Fascist one, and they feature in very few photographs from the 1930s, with some of the more famous ones taken by the Austrian-born British Communist photographer Edith Tudor-Hart.92 Tudor-Hart’s photographs were taken in an Italian gypsy camp: children and their mothers are smiling and laughing, part of a close-knit community, living barefoot in ragged dresses in a rugged landscape. The gypsy identity is connected to landlessness, the antithesis of the Fascist obsession with territory, blood, and belonging. A member of the Artists International Association (AIA) and the Workers Camera Club, Tudor-Hart published in Communist periodicals as part of her antifascist political activism.

In the same way as the regime feared and despised gypsies, religious and superstitious behavior among peasant communities constituted a widespread aspect of Italian culture that the regime considered a problem and yet did not document. With the Lateran Pacts signed in 1929, Mussolini and Pope Pius XI managed to find an uncomfortable accord regarding religious behavior under Fascism.93 In general, the Catholic Church was, like the regime, but for different reasons, opposed to certain religious rites such as animal worship, which it repressed more radically after the Second World War. Before 1945, such pagan practices were frowned upon, and yet, because they were so deeply entrenched in peasant culture, they were not rejected outright. At times, they were integrated with Christian lore; at others they remained folkloric and not necessarily religious. While they can be read within a religious precedent and a long tradition of Italian medieval and Renaissance paintings of saints, miracles, the Adoration, and ecstasies, some of the rituals involved the animal kingdom, fertility, and nature worship as well as, at times, anti-Christian representations of the Holy Ghost as a man. Others required pilgrims to enact cowed humiliation before God, in contrast to the unabashed poise of modern Fascist peasants seen earlier.

The reality of this civilization was recorded in the 1930s by, among others, Pasquale De Antonis, Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini, and Luciano Morpurgo. These anthropological photographs of religious processions and rural rituals can be seen as participating in a form of low-level resistance. The “rediscovery” of these photographers after the Second World War may, in part, be attributed to the Marxist interest in Italian folklore developed in the 1960s, following the writings of the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino, whose expeditions are examined in Chapter 3. The cultural anthropologist and photographer Annabella Rossi, who had participated on expeditions with De Martino in the south of Italy from 1959 onward, developed an interest in the culture of abject poverty (miseria). Rossi cultivated the importance of ethnographic photography by building the first anthropological photographic archive at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari (National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions) in 1956.94 Architects had designed the museum in 1938, a year after the Paris World Fair and the newly opened Musée de l’Homme and Musée des arts et traditions populaires in Paris, marking an important moment for anthropology.

Built in the modernist EUR area of Rome, the museum was completed in 1942, in time for the Universal Exhibition E42 (Esposizione Universale Roma—EUR being its acronym). E42 was cancelled due to the war, leaving the museum empty until its postwar opening. One of the many frescoes in the lofty museum halls depicts a scene of animal worship by the artist Tommaso Cascella (Figure 1.14). A child dressed in white with angel wings sits on top of a white bull kneeling before a man playing a musical instrument. Crowds have gathered around, and some kneel beside the ox. The Ox of Saint Zopito (Il Bue di San Zopito) referred to an ancient fertility rite celebrated in the Abruzzi, which had nonetheless been absorbed into Catholic rituals despite being residually pagan. Cascella, inspired by Verga’s prose and D’Annunzio’s interest in describing “primitive” lifestyles, was from the Abruzzi and witness to the ritual that took place each year in Loreto Aprutino.95 The rite required a piper to invite the animal to kneel before the silver bust of Saint Zopito before following it into the village church. After kneeling, the ox was led to the center of the nave where it was meant to defecate. Its excrement was then read as an agricultural omen.96 According to scholarship, the idea of animals kneeling before saints arises from an ancient Italian tradition whereby the first to adore Jesus in the crib were animals, with the ass kneeling before him and the ox’s horns lighting up at the tips. Another medieval legend from the eleventh century tells of two oxen that, after witnessing an apparition, knelt in adoration in front of a Byzantine icon of the Madonna of the Seven Veils in a cave in Foggia (Puglia).97 Cascella’s scene, while not conforming to Fascist ideas of a progressive peasantry, was confined within the scientific remit of a museum and, as a result, considered safe. Photographs of such scenes, on the other hand, are harder to find in published material and would not fit in with the image the regime sought to project of itself.

FIGURE 1.14 Tommaso Cascella, The Ox of San Zopito (Il bue di San Zopito), 1941, fresco, 477 × 633 cm. Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, Rome © Tommaso Cascella by SIAE 2015.

An avant-garde editor, poet, artist, and photographer, Federigo Valli was one of the few to have given space to photographs of “primitive” rituals in his beautifully produced monthly Documento (1941–43), which was also issued in German from 1942.98 In a typical association, Valli juxtaposed a violent drawing by Guttuso entitled La Resa della Città (heralding the 1944 Gott Mit Uns series, which told the heroic story of the Resistance) with an article by Mussolini’s son-in-law, the Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, on the Anticomintern Pact in December 1941. Documento managed to combine an obsequious attitude toward the regime with a culturally antifascist vent de fronde. Valli, who had a vast experience in the publishing world (he was a journalist, correspondent, and director of newspapers such as Gioventù fascista, Rivoluzione fascista, Corriere della Sera, Popolo d’Italia, Tempo, and L’Ala d’Italia, as well as President of the National Federation of Books, Secretary of the World Association of Aeronautical Press and Director General of the Aeronautical Publishing Industry), was a maverick figure in Fascist cultural history whose importance has been overlooked due to the scholarly veil that has been drawn over publishing in the period between 1941 and 1946.99 Valli also worked in the art world, entrusting a gallery he opened in 1944, La Margherita, to Irene Brin. Famous for reinventing Italian fashion after the Second World War, Brin subsequently opened her own contemporary art gallery in Rome—L’Obelisco —which gained international renown. La Margherita, which cultivated a refined and elitist culture, promoted similar artists to those of La Cometa, as well as the newly opened Galleria dello Zodiaco and Galleria del Secolo, all three of which would open postwar Rome up to contemporary artists and the art market in a way that had not been done before.100

The photo-essays in Documento were radical for the time, partly inspired by the “Longanesian” lessons of Omnibus and L’Italiano, yet moving into an even more dynamic direction: barely containing any text, the images spoke for themselves, collaged in visually arresting displays. Valli, aware of the trends in American photography, also published FSA photographs, although these tended to illustrate ideas that had little in common with the aims of the American governmental project. Unaccredited and erroneously referenced, Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother is captioned “Strike” on a page subtitled “Rents and Loans,” meant to function as an anti-American answer to the photo-essay’s main question “Why do we go to war?.”101 The anonymous author of the photo-essay indirectly attributes the causes of the war to the United States’ capitalist system that promotes a free and deregulated market in which the poor remain enslaved to landowners, corporations, and banks, using visual connections and very little explanatory text.

In the same April 1941 issue, Valli published eighteen of De Antonis’ photographs of religious rituals, but did not acknowledge his name.102 De Antonis’ photographs can be inscribed in the avant-garde interest of a return to the roots of the peasant world of ritual and devotion. It is a moot point whether his anthropological photographs were considered acceptable for publication due to his position as a professional photographer for the regime. His photographs of the Fascist cavalry had won him a year-long grant to the Centro Sperimentale del Cinema in 1936 and he took portraits of Fascist and Nazi dignitaries during the Second World War.103 He subsequently risked his life when working for the Resistance, although in the 1930s, he had also worked for the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL), the Fascist youth group in Pescara, documenting their choreographed sports. According to a short story by Ennio Flaiano, De Antonis would photograph children on the streets when the Fascist dignitaries he was commissioned to photograph were not paying attention.104 In the photo-essay “Men and Snakes,” Valli mixes up photographs from a number of different festivities and holy days such as the Holy Day of the Little Virgins (Festa delle verginelle), the Celebration of the Snake Tamers (Festa dei serpari), and Easter in Spoltore (Pasqua a Spoltore) and includes a photograph of a young fortune-teller with a parrot and a cage full of fortunes in the upper left-hand corner (Figures 1.15 and 1.16).

FIGURE 1.15 Pasquale De Antonis, Snake man (Serpentaro), c. 1939 © Riccardo De Antonis. Courtesy of Archivio De Antonis, Rome.

FIGURE 1.16 Pasquale De Antonis, Men and Snakes (Uomini e serpi), Documento, April 1941 © Riccardo De Antonis. Courtesy of Archivio De Antonis, Rome.

The dropped photograph on the right-hand page links the images on a diagonal, recreating the spontaneous theatricality of a religious procession. The various cults covered in the photo-essay are subsumed by the cult of the snake, which, as the text observes, is especially practiced in Cucullo as part of the celebration of the Miracle of Saint Dominic of Cucullo. Teenage boys and men go into the countryside to collect grass snakes, sometimes returning with twenty or thirty of them. The snakes wrap themselves around small baskets containing objects relating to Saint Dominic or are worn like scarves by the boys and men. A Catholic Mass is held in different parts of Cucullo, after which the icon of Saint Dominic is transported from inside the main church writhing with snakes, in a typical collusion of pagan and Catholic rituals. During the festivities, the snakes are frustrated so that they bite the men on their arms and hands as proof of their virility. The snakes are then lengthened and measured against a ruler as part of a phallic contest on who owns the “longest snake.” For the Festival of the Little Virgins, young girls (and sometimes young boys) from Rapino were dressed in ornate clothes and made to wear precious family heirlooms made of gold. They were paraded in spring to pay homage to the patron saint of Rapino and as part of a pagan celebration of nature and fertility. De Antonis captured the children in natural states, with one girl rubbing her eyes with tiredness. They are not the well-behaved, Duce-saluting, smiling children photographed by the LUCE. Their extravagant dresses contrasted with the minimalism of Fascist Balilla uniforms. These photographs were meant as gifts for the parents of the children, although De Antonis kept a number of them for himself, some of which he subsequently touched up with color.

Peasant world traditions followed ancestral narratives that served to bond the communities through annual festivities, in which spirituality was often combined with theatrical performances. The ritual surrounding the yearly reenactment of the Wolf of Pretoro stealing the last newborn from the village and returning it, by the end of the play, to its falsely distressed parents, was a symbol that the village was protected by a higher power. Taking place in May, the people of Pretoro came together in a natural amphitheater in the lower part of the village. Three men would enact the play, one dressed as a wolf and the two others as a couple. The power of the wolf and its baby-stealing potential loomed large in the people’s imagination and the ritual served as a way of staving off a primordial fear. Animal cults were part of the mythic primitivism that had first attracted late-nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists like Verga, D’Annunzio, or the artist-photographer Francesco Paolo Michetti, to explore the rich world of peasant folklore. Michetti, who was from the Abruzzi, photographed and painted processions and miracles as well as beggars and cripples.105 In 1881, he began painting the seven-meter long Il voto (The Vow) around the time Verga published I Malavoglia (1881) (Figure 1.17). It was completed in 1883 and displayed at the first International Exposition in Rome to great acclaim.106 Verga’s literary verismo movement inspired fin-de-siècle Italian artistic photographers Michetti, Count Giuseppe Primoli, and Mario Nunes Vais. Their work combined a need to express solidarity with the poor and document their condition as well as a nostalgia for their “primitive” practices, maintaining a sacred aura around their subjects that could render them picturesque. The mixture of sacred and profane in the locals’ ancestral connection with the earth, combined with their Catholic beliefs, emerges in many of Michetti’s paintings.

FIGURE 1.17 Francesco Paolo Michetti, The Vow (Il Voto), 1880, oil on canvas, 250 × 700 cm, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome © Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome.

The Festa di San Pantaleone in Miglianico (Abruzzo) featured a tradition in which peasants would place themselves flat on the ground in a position of total humiliation. As they dragged themselves toward the altar, they would kiss or lick the pavement out of devotion and thanks to God. By the time they reached the effigy of the saint to embrace it, they were trembling and often bloodied from scraping over rough ground.107 D’Annunzio’s review of Michetti’s painting remarked on the figure nearest the bust of Saint Pantaleone:

All the terrible barbarity of that realism, the grim intensity of that faith, all the convulsion of that spasm is absorbed in that senile figure clinging with the extreme effort of his arms to the silver simulacrum and latching onto its mouth his own bloodied mouth. His entire face and bald head is confused with the metal effigy, in the filth of blood and dust; but a silver reflection dances in the human eye winning over the gleam of faith.108

Michetti’s representation of this extreme form of Catholic devotion acted as a thunderbolt at the Exposition, encouraging artists to take a political stance. In the 1930s, De Antonis was inspired by Michetti’s work and by his friend the artist Tommaso Cascella. Like Michetti, both artists were from the Abruzzi. In De Antonis’s photograph San Gabriele, Il voto (1935), a man’s body is splayed out on the floor, his feet protruding behind the priest. The man kisses the first step to a church altar, accompanied by two women in scarves who are by his side on their knees. This early attempt at an indoor documentation of a devotional act was part of De Antonis’s brief, but significant, incursion in documenting ancient religious rituals. The photographer who spent the most time on such rituals, however, was Luciano Morpurgo, who documented peasant devotion in Lazio between 1917 and 1923 and again in 1937. These photographs were exhibited for the first time four days after his death in 1971 at the SICOF (International Salon of Cinema, Optics and Photography—Salone Internazionale della Cinematografia, Ottica e Fotografia) in Milan.109 A total of 184 large plate glass negatives of which half had deteriorated irrevocably, were not developed until then, allowing between thirty and fifty years to pass between the time the photographs were taken, and the first time they were exhibited. In this way, De Antonis’ situation was similar, because aside from his unaccredited photographs published in Documento, his anthropological photographs were not seen again until 1984 at the Museo Nazionale delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari in Rome.110

Morpurgo, like De Antonis, was a commercial photographer and probably served the regime on a professional basis in the early 1930s by working for the Istituto LUCE and the TCI; he had also previously conducted an advertisement campaign for Cirio tinned tomatoes between 1915 and 1918.111 In 1924, he founded the Istituto Fotografico Italiano and in 1925, he set up his own publishing house.112 In 1927, he went to Palestine with the geographer Roberto Almagià. His photographs of Palestine have been well covered, whereas his anthropological series taken in Vallepietra on the Monte Autore in Lazio near Rome are less known. Morpurgo had begun his practice before the First World War in his native Spalato in Dalmatia (currently Split, Croatia) by taking portraits of peasants and beggars in rural settings.113 After 1937, he was forced into hiding because of the Racial Laws. In Morpurgo's Vallepietra, a peasant crawls with her face close to the ground along a bare path strewn with straw, followed in the distance by a procession of pilgrims (Figure 1.18). Her prostrate position is the antithesis of the Fascist salute, where the body is erect and the face uncovered and proud. Arrigo Ravaioli, a law student who died of the Spanish flu in 1918, first introduced Morpurgo to the pilgrimages in 1917.114 Non-pilgrims had been visiting the site since 1880, when the Club Alpino Italiano organized a mountain climb at the time of the pilgrimage.115 The mixture of pilgrims and upper-class tourists was captured on film by Morpurgo, documenting a rare mixture of social classes. The celebration of the day of the Very Holy Trinity (SS. Trinità) still takes place every year on July 24, the day of Saint Anna, bringing together pilgrims from the three regions of Lazio, the Abruzzi, and Campania. At the time, however, pilgrims would ascend the sacred mountain on any day between May and October, as soon as the snow had melted. On the SS. Trinità, they would sing praise and ask for mercy as they made their way up the mountain, often on their knees, until they reached a sanctuary in a cave on Monte Autore in Lazio.116 There they would venerate an icon and listen to young girls sing the Passion of Christ on the dawn of the day of the Holy Trinity. Morpurgo described the scenes he witnessed:

FIGURE 1.18 Luciano Morpurgo, Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of SS. Trinità (Sunday after Pentecost) (Pellegrinaggio al santuario della SS. Trinità (Domenica dopo Pentecoste)), 1917–37 © Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Rome.

They enter the Sanctuary to pray and invoke grace, they push one another, bang into each other in order to reach the altar first, bringing paralysed children, invalids, the blind, and while this whole woeful procession exits to one side, coming up one of the paths of the mountain you have a procession of women dressed in white with their faces veiled, their heads adorned with crowns of flowers.117

The various stages of the celebration constitute a spectacle that caught the attention of other photographers, including the renowned British archaeologist and director at the British School of Rome, Thomas Ashby, in 1912 and 1924 and the Italian author Emilio Cecchi in 1934.118 Morpurgo’s photographs, however, are the only ones that constitute a systematic documentation of the processions and meditative individual portraits of the pilgrims.

In 1930, Morpurgo put forward a project titled “Proposal for a Vast Collection of Our Popular Traditions” at the Congress for Popular Arts and Traditions in Trento, seven years before the inauguration of the Musée des arts et traditions populaires in Paris. The board of the Congress, however, rejected Morpurgo’s proposal on unknown grounds.119 Reasons for the rejection of Morpurgo’s project could be related to the circumstances surrounding the confiscation of the humanist photographer August Sander’s photographic book Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit). Published in 1929 as a systematic documentation of the German people, it was removed from the market in 1934, a year after the National Socialists gained power. Although many of the photographs depicted the petite bourgeoisie, a number of them focused on peasants, the working classes, gypsies, the disabled, and the unemployed, whose humble expressions resemble those of Morpurgo’s pilgrims. Face of Our Time was banned from circulation because it “described the German society as less than perfectly homogeneous or racially pure” and had been criticized for being a document neither of “uplift, enthusiasm, let alone essence.”120 Morpurgo’s work could be considered an equivalent Italian effort to document domestic types or traditions, although he maintained a sociological focus on peasants and beggars. Due to a lack of evidence, the ideological motivations behind the choices of social typologies are only hypotheses in Morpurgo’s case. The fact that he failed to publish or exhibit them denotes that they probably did not have a commercial appeal under Fascism, and that they deviated from appropriate representational regimes. Morpurgo’s Jewishness would probably not have affected his production until 1938. Pozzi-Bellini’s short documentary film The Young Virgins’ Lament (Il Pianto delle Zitelle) of the same procession in Vallepietra made in 1939 was, despite receiving a prize at the VII Venice Film Biennial that year, banned by the Fascist censorship commission for public release when he refused to cut certain scenes of mass gatherings that risked having an “overly powerful visual impact.”121 And yet, the seventeen-minute documentary was commended by the Fascist author and intellectual Cecchi who reviewed it in the periodical Civiltà, commenting on its images of “raw beauty, cordial austerity: images of naïve and venerable aristocracy, of an accomplished and classically composed humanity.”122 Cecchi cofounded and directed Civiltà in 1940 in honor of the upcoming Rome Expo E42, with the aim of glorifying Italian culture, just as the Venice Film Festival had been created in 1932 as an incentive to increase Italian film production. The film embodied a contradiction according to Fascist criteria: it promoted Italian culture, yet it risked promoting the “wrong” kind of culture.

Censorship rules under Fascism for this kind of photography appear unavailable, unlike the rules in existence for photojournalism, war photography, and literature, as seen in the next chapter. The Commission for Literary Epuration (Commissione della bonifica libraria), formed in 1938 as part of the Ministry of Popular Culture, removed books from circulation as diverse as Lenin’s biography by Valeriu Marcu, Trotsky’s My Life (1930), Robert Graves’ I, Claudius (1934), books by Curzio Malaparte and Massimo Bontempelli, and anything that was “anti-Italian, anti-racist, immoral and depressing.”123 The criteria for Fascist censorship of the film still remain opaque, as well as unproven, although it has been used as a demonstration for Italian “backwardness” at a time when the documentary genre was, from Robert Flaherty to Joris Ivens, becoming a full-fledged mode of mass communication.

Pozzi-Bellini, with a degree in law from Florence, was introduced to the Italian intellectual elite from a young age. Among his friends, he counted Cecchi, Eugenio Montale and Elio Vittorini, the artist Marino Marini, and the musician Dalla Piccola. In 1932, on a trip to Paris, he met the Prévert brothers with whom he developed a lifelong friendship.124 Pozzi-Bellini moved from filmmaking to documentary photography, eventually photographing art works after the Second World War. A series of photographs of his native Sicily taken in 1940 and 1941 with a view to making a film inspired by Verga’s novels show a large yearly livestock market that would take place near Enna and farm-related activities, including workers in the fields, threshing, a woman darning at a window, and Sunday Mass. Funds to make the film were insufficient, though Pozzi-Bellini’s photographs testify to the recuperation of a Verghian realism and sociopolitical preoccupations with the human condition, in line with the Cinema group. His Sicilian photographs were shown for the first time in a monographic exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1982 as part of the museum’s new series on photography and art, confirming the fact that many of these humanist-style photographs only began to be acknowledged in the 1980s.

Conclusion

In line with the agenda of the regime, Fascist documentary photography produced a romanticized vision of ruralism, creating a “new” Fascist peasantry that did not correspond to the reality of the traditions and rituals being practiced in the countryside. This progressive peasantry was created via the extensive, ubiquitous use and promotion of photography in all aspects of Italian cultural life in the 1930s, from exhibitions (e.g., the Milan Triennials) to richly illustrated propaganda photobooks (e.g., L’Italia fascista in Cammino or Il Volto agricolo dell’Italia) and the many new illustrated periodicals that arrived on the market in those years, from Tempo to L’Italiano and Primato.

An in-depth analysis of the periodicals, however, revealed that not all of them towed a clear party line, in particular after 1936, with a number favoring an intellectual, anthropological interest in themes avoided or despised by the regime and others promoting a humanist, or neorealist, style of photography and graphic display. The critical Fascists’ move to return to realism in an attempt to counteract the artificial optimism of the regime coincided with a number of paradigm shifts on the international horizon: anthropology was emerging as a discipline under the powerful influence of George Henri Rivière in France, Communists began gaining prestige through their intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and American Depression literature and photography inspired left-wing Fascist circles. These events affected the new “revolutionary” visions developed by the members of the Cinema group or the artists shown at La Cometa. The ambiguity of Fascist visual culture promoted during this period was particularly embodied in Leo Longanesi’s contribution to the world of documentary photography, which pioneered an Italian style of “ironic photojournalism” in which a “humanist” or “neorealist” photograph did not necessarily correspond to a socially engaged discourse about the disenfranchised.

At the same time, a number of photographers can be considered to have worked “underground,” documenting the “primitive” reality of a peasant world where Catholic beliefs were mixed with pagan lore and superstitions. Pasquale De Antonis and Luciano Morpurgo were not declared antifascists, and yet, their work can be considered “humanist” given its focus on peasants’ religious rituals, beggars, and gypsies, which were not part of the accepted visual repertoire of the regime. This “clandestine” photography was part of an attempt to represent the core of Italian culture that can be inscribed in nineteenth-century artistic, social, and spiritual concerns, from Francesco Paolo Michetti’s paintings to D’Annunzio and Verga’s literary production. The rediscovery of these photographs in the 1980s testified to a rising left-wing interest in disappearing peasant traditions, which had begun in the 1950s under the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino. The postwar explosion of humanist photography can therefore be considered to have its roots, to some extent, in the failed ruralist and social-popular ideals of Fascism.

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