ITALY: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY announces a double narrative: a century of Italy as well as a century of photography.
The earliest photograph in the book, taken in 1884, of the large conservatory of the Italian Horticultural Society, shows us a place frequented by well-off people of a century ago, some of whom probably owned cameras and practiced photography at a very expert level as a hobby; a picture like this could have been taken by one of the Society’s members. The most recent photograph, taken in 1984, shows us not a real place (not an Italian interior, not even something in Italy) but a portion of the world (Europe) of which Italy is a part; an aerial view, it’s a picture not so much taken as arranged, by professionals, aided by computers.
There is nothing distinctively Italian about either photograph, though both photographs bespeak their period. In the first one we see a lush example of the glass-and-iron shape given to new exhibition halls, markets, and railway stations all over Europe in the mid- and late nineteenth century. The aerial photograph is also an example of a subject that could have been photographed elsewhere in the same way; what dates it, though, is not what we see but that we can see it. It is an
example of something that can be seen only in the form of a photograph, and could only be photographed (thanks to the existence of other, allied technologies) now.
The subjects of both photographs have an obtrusive geometry; neither includes people. But the conservatory is a site that appears to be just temporarily vacated of people, to get this picture of the overbearing architecture and the valiant plants. It is very much a human, historically specific world. One easily imagines people reinserted in this place, milling about in it. The world of the aerial photograph is a world of things beyond the human scale from which people are necessarily absent. Here the human, historical fact has no place.
But history—time—is the unifying topic of this seemingly random collection of subjects. How striking, then, that the anthologist, Cesare Colombo, has selected as the most recent photograph one in which history is annihilated in favor of geography; in which the accents of time are made irrelevant by the scale of this uniformly marked distribution of space.
Are we to read this as a history-minded comment on the part of the anthologist: an acknowledgment of the Euro-destiny of Italy, its demise as a distinctive culture and absorption into the homogenizing system of greeds created by multi-national capitalism? Or is it simply a formal device: the anthologist’s perhaps overemphatic way of decreeing a closure for the collection? If only the latter, the device is, of necessity, arbitrary. For it defies the very nature of photography, and of collections of photographs, which is that they are open-ended; that they cannot conclude. There can be no definitive or summative or terminal photograph, or collection of photographs. Only more photographs. More collections …
A COLLECTION OF IMAGES of the Italian past published by Alinari—though most of the photographs aren’t from the Alinari archives—reminds us that a photograph is rarely a work of individual seeing but almost inevitably a (potential) unit in an archive. The archive can be that of the Alinari enterprise, which appears less as the very successful business it was than as a cultural operation, a vast collective
endeavor for documenting Italian society that extended over many decades, in which the names of individual photographers have been suppressed, like those of the artisans who worked on the Gothic cathedrals. More often, the archive is that of single photographers—prolific professionals with studios from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, and also contemporary photographers whose manipulations of their subjects, in the service of fashion and other kinds of advertising, produce results that are most unlike the innocently scrupulous documentation practiced by older forms of commercial photography. Avowed proponents of bad taste such as Carlo Mollino and celebrants of celebrity such as Elio Luxardo are now museum-worthy, no less than such illustrious proponents of the serious and beautiful in photography as Paul Strand and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The most eccentric, partial view could constitute an archive of invaluable images of (from, about) the past. Even the soft-focus superimpositions of the self-styled Futurist Anton Bragaglia which are located nowhere and the staged al fresco fantasies of the erotomane Baron von Gloeden located in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Taormina have their period charm, their status as documents.
(Though the destiny of all photographs is to end up in an archive housed in a museum, they can still lead, singly, a life outside the museum—the extramural life of a document being that of a souvenir; here, too, time effects its droll mutations. In a journal entry of 1952 Jean Cocteau relates the story of a forty-year-old fisherman in Taormina, furious because one of the shops in the main street was exhibiting von Gloeden’s photographs of his grandfather completely naked with a crown of roses. Surely it was just a few years later that, in all shops in town catering to tourists, von Gloeden’s daintily erotic photographs of naked local youths of yesteryear were to be found as postcards.)
Italian photography is exceptionally rich in superb photographs which have a primary status as documents. One thinks, first of all, of the best images from the Alinari holdings and of the work of Giuseppe Primoli, the most fascinating figure in the history of Italian photography, who was himself something of a one-person Alinari enterprise. (A photograph by Primoli—of someone taking a photograph—begins this
book.) If the collective activities of the Alinari firm and the ultraindividual enterprise practiced by the dilettante aristocrat Primoli were both supremely archive-creating ventures, it should be noted that the word “archive,” with its implicit claim of disinterested curiosity, conceals much of the complex ideological agenda behind this glorious burst of picture-taking.
Consider the Alinari collection, more than a hundred thousand pictures. It seems like a nineteenth-century updating of the eighteenth-century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, which was less an instrument of learning than an expression of collecting mania, the appetite for accumulation and classification; wonder, a favorite sentiment of that era, and one unburdened by historical understanding, depends on ignorance as much as on knowledge. But it also seems an example of a distinctively nineteenth-century ideological project, shared by some of the century’s greatest novelists, which was to provide an encyclopedic understanding of social reality, from the highest to the lowest levels, as something that unfolds historically. Last, and perhaps most decisively, it seems like a proto-twentieth-century project: a mode of advertising, of creating needs and boosting consumption.
The Alinari photographers started by specializing in the great works of art of their native city, Florence. For a small, wealthy class of travelers on their Grand Tour, Italy had long been the country where one came to look at the art, and the art in Florence more than in any other Italian city. Collectible photographic documentation played an essential role in the democratizing of this construction of Italy by the happy few, which has made the country into the world’s single most desired, most prestigious target for the instant appreciations of mass tourism.
The dissemination of art in the form of photographs—a first version of what André Malraux, who lifted the idea from Walter Benjamin, described as the museum without walls—was soon extended to the whole physical environment, which could be collected as pictures. Exhaustive documentation meant, in fact, a preference for the strongly contrasting: feats of urban renewal (as that was understood in the last century) juxtaposed with ancient sites and monuments, the vitality of the swarthy poor as well as the glamour and remoteness of the rich and
powerful. Photographs disseminated not just art (the art of the past) but all of the past—and the present, inexorably on its way to becoming the past (that is, art). The notion of art is extended to include the past as such: we look at the past, any part of it, aesthetically.
PHOTOGRAPHS ARE NOT windows which supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly, as it was. Photographs give evidence—often spurious, always incomplete—in support of dominant ideologies and existing social arrangements. They fabricate and confirm these myths and arrangements.
How? By making statements about what is in the world, what we should look at. Photographs tell us how things ought to look, what their subjects should reveal about themselves.
Photographs taken in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely fail to make visible the markers of status. We associate this with posing. The process itself took time: one couldn’t take photographs on the run. With posing, whether in a studio portrait or in pictures of people taken on the sites of work and recreation, there can be a conscious construction of what is seemly, appropriate, attractive. The way most old photographs look expounds the value of uprightness, explicitness, informativeness, orderly spacing; but from the 1930s on, and this cannot only be due to the evolution of camera technology, the look of photographs confirms the value of movement, animation, asymmetry, enigma, informal social relations. Modern taste judges the way workers in the old photographs of building sites and factories were stiffly posed to be a kind of lie—concealing, for instance, the reality of their physical exertion. We prefer to see the sweat, in informal, unposed-looking shots in which people are caught in a movement—that is what looks truthful (if not always beautiful) to us. We feel more comfortable with what features exertion, awkwardness, and conceals the realities of control (self-control, control by others), of power—revelations we now judge, oddly enough, to be “artificial.”
Two contrasts, a century apart.
On the front endpaper, a celebrated image. It is the ordered, heavily signifying decor and spaciousness of the bourgeois photography
studio (in fact, the Alinari salon). Deep space: everyone is seen full figure, remotely, discreetly. Someone (seated, weighty) is being photographed. People seem becalmed. Everyone is taking his or her time.
On the endpaper at the back, a familiar kind of image. A pack of journalists, paparazzi, standing, densely crowded together, straining, shoving, taking their images by force. (Is there any justice in the fact that the international word for predatory photographers who jump their celebrity targets is Italian?) Shallow space: everyone is seen partially, close up, indiscreetly. Not enough of the room to identify it, no decor—this is a placeless space. And everyone is in a big hurry.
THE FUNCTION OF an anthology is to represent a world. This anthology, this token chronicle of a century, represents a world as it submits to the imperatives of time.
Most of the pictures are records of a highly distinctive society that is profoundly used (in several senses of the word), the Italy mourned by Pasolini in Uccellacci e uccellini, the Italy that no longer exists, or is dying, in the throes of being replaced, since the 1950s, by the trans-Italian Italy of the consumer society. The difference between the two Italys is enormous, visceral, shocking.
The distinctive Italy was a society in which the photographer’s practice was an incursion: the photographer could be only an observer. In the new Italy the photograph and photographic activities (TV, video, monitoring, playback) are central. It seems a new version of the way that photography has participated in the past not only in the commercialization of reality but in its unification. The Alinari enterprise, founded in the early 1850s, could be regarded as itself an instrument of the subsequent political unification of Italy, as the scope of the firm’s activities, which first had only Florence as its subject, broadened to include the countryside and other cities—the whole country. Now, for several decades, Italian photography—photographic endeavors by many hands—has participated mightily in the project of unifying Italy culturally (which also means politically) with Europe, with the Atlantic world. Photographic images play a large role in making Italy (be? or only look?) more and more like … everywhere else.
All of Europe is in mourning for its past. Bookstores are stocked with albums of photographs offering up the vanished past for our delectation and reflex nostalgia. But the past has deeper roots in Italy than anywhere else in Europe, which makes its destruction more defining. And the elegiac note was sounded earlier and more plangently in Italy, as was the note of rancor—think of the Futurist tantrums about the past: the calls to burn the museums, fill in the Grand Canal and make it a highway, and so on. Comparable anthologies of photographs of, say, premodern France or Germany do not move in quite this way.
The depth possessed by these images of an older Italy is not just the depth of the past. It is the depth of a whole culture, a culture of incomparable dignity and flavor and bulk, that has been thinned out, effaced, confiscated. To be replaced by a culture in which the notion of depth is meaningless. That is not meant to be sauntered through. That becomes an abstraction. To be seen as an image. To be seen from the air …
[1987]