Italian Neorealist Photography

Its Legacy and Aftermath

Antonella Russo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000213546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

This book offers an analysis of the socio-historical conditions of the rise of postwar Italian photography, considers its practices, and outlines its destiny.

Antonella Russo provides an incisive examination of Neorealist photography, delineates its periodization, traces its instances and its progressive popularization and subsequent co-optation that occurred with the advent of the industrialization of photographic magazines. This volume examines the ethno(photo)graphic missions of Ernesto De Martino in the deep South of Italy, the key role played by the Neorealist writer and painter Carlo Levi as "ambassador of international photography", and the journeys of David Seymour, Henry Cartier Bresson, and Paul Strand in Neorealist Italy. The text includes an account the formation and proliferation of Italian photographic associations and their role in institutionalizing and promoting Italian photography, their link to British and other European photographic societies, and the subsequent decline of Neorealism. It also considers the inception of non-objective photography that thrived soon after the war, in concurrence with the circulation of Neorealism, thus debunking the myth identifying all Italian postwar photography with the Neorealist image.

This book will be particularly useful for scholars and students in the history and theory of photography, and Italian history.

1 The Question about Neorealist Photography

DOI: 10.4324/9781003103578-2

Neorealist Photography: Themes and Questions

When discussing Neorealism, certain famed images invariably come to mind: the breathless chase of Pina (Anna Magnani) in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta ¹ (Rome Open City, 1945), the tears of little Bruno (Enzo Stajola) in Ladri di Biciclette ² (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), or the evocations of Lucanian landscapes in Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli ³ (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945), an initiatory journey through those dark lands of Southern Italy “abandoned even by God”.

By contrast, one is less inclined to think of a single photograph that exemplifies and makes reference to the years of Neorealism (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Pasquale De Antonis, Forze alleate a Roma (Allied Forces in Rome), 1945 © De Antonis Archive, Rome.

This brief period in Italian history, a moment associated with the palingenesis of the nation and perceived as the rebirth of Italy from the ashes of the recent war and its reformation into a modern Western democracy, is considered an emblematic regenerative movement in the visual arts, and more particularly in Italian photography.

Unlike the more renowned literature, art or cinema, however, the photography produced in the years following the Second World War has been scantily examined and probed into, despite the fact that, as we will explain, multiple links can be identified among the aesthetic canons and subject matter that connect the photographic image to the Neorealist current.

In recent decades, there has been a succession of exhibitions and publications dedicated to the “rediscovery” and re-evaluation of Neorealism as a principal current of photography, too, understood to be of central importance to the history of Italian postwar photography. Yet despite the renewed attention of scholars and curators, to this day the study of Neorealist photography still leaves us with more unresolved questions than common points of view; particularly with regard to the definition of its project, or the resolution of the vexata quaestio of its contamination with postwar literature, and especially with cinema, with which it shares more than one link.

Although articulated and thorough, the available essays on the subject have thus far failed to adequately establish the field of enquiry, to define its claims, and, above all, to determine its chronological limits. Rather than outlining the history, or historiography, of photographic Neorealism, many essays have limited themselves to describing it as representing a new “tendency” and even an exemplary “image” of Italian photographic production, failing to elaborate a theoretical definition capable of identifying its key traits while also refraining from dispelling the nebulous rhetoric that still surrounds this phase, one that was in many ways fundamental for Italian photography.

The recent exhibition NeoRealismo. La nuova immagine in Italia 1932–1960 (“Neorealism: The New Image in Italy 1932–1960”), although having had the merit of gathering a rich selection of valuable images by little-known photographers, failed to develop an overall theoretical framework capable of identifying its defining features and caesurae within the context of postwar imagery, as well as the similarities and discontinuities of its various phases, thus contributing to a revival of old clichés about postwar Italian photography. ⁴

Almost 40 years ago, in his pivotal essay Neorealismo, storia e geografia (“Neorealism: History and Geography”), film theorist Alberto Farassino (1944–2003) had already highlighted a series of incongruous and unreliable assertions that one still encounters on a regular basis even in the most up-to-date studies concerning Neorealist imagery, which propose interpretative models that have, by now, become difficult to sustain.

One of the main points raised by Farassino concerned the identification, and consequent confusion, of Neorealism with italianità itself, as if it could represent a cultural tendency emblematic of the entire national patrimony. Just as the whole of postwar Italian cinema is often identified and conflated with Neorealist cinema, so, too, Italian Neorealist photography tends to be considered as the origin of all Italian photography and as a sort of primal scene of the contemporary Italian visual arts. ⁵

Furthermore, the history of photography, much like that of the cinema, has been subjected to certain prejudicial notions according to which the postwar years have been seen as having witnessed a rediscovery and flourishing of the medium, as if the conflict had helped to exorcize or accelerate the manifestation of Italian “creativity” and “genius” in this field, too.

An analysis of the theoretical presuppositions on which Neorealist photography is founded, one that emphasizes its novelty and necessity, therefore has to start from the restrictions, aporias, and lacunae of these untenable assumptions.

The first exhaustive contribution to the subject – Ennery Taramelli’s Viaggio nell’Italia del Neorealismo (“Journey through the Italy of Neorealism”), which was published almost 30 years ago – had the indisputable merit of bringing to the attention of historians that “narration by means of images and words” typical of the immediate Italian postwar era, and comprehensively documented this tendency. ⁶ However, by adopting this model, which related to the ideas of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Taramelli understood Neorealist photography as arte media: that is to say, as an existing midway between (academic) literature and (popular) cinema, neglecting to consider its specificity and the different means of its reception.

According to Taramelli, Neorealist photography revealed affinities with the sensibilities of certain writers and future Italian cineastes, who were inspired by readings from their youth such as Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Elio Vittorini (1908–1966), Cesare Pavese (1908–1950), Corrado Alvaro (1895–1956), and subsequently turned them into a more mature cinematographic language. The photographic experiments of Vittorini in Americana (1942), literary magazine “Il Politecnico” (“The Polytechnic”, 1945–1947), and the photo-novel Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily, 1953), would fall into the category of photographic/literary Neorealism, as would the photographic images of the future film director Alberto Lattuada (1914–2005); proceeding in this linear narration, one could also trace correspondences between the early experiments of photographers such as Luigi Crocenzi (1923–1984), Federico Patellani (1911–1977), and the Publifoto Agency, whose works she perceived as correlating to films by cineastes Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), Luchino Visconti (1906–1976), Vittorio De Sica (1901–1974), and Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), whose masterpieces were soon to become iconic examples of Neorealism. ⁷

Casually confused with the literary and cinematic subjects of the 1930s and 1940s, and discussed solely as an outgrowth of the films produced during those years, Taramelli goes on to identify Neorealist photography with the production of a generation of photographers born in the late 1920s: Mario Giacomelli (1925–2000), Piergiorgio Branzi (1928), Alfredo Camisa (1927–2007), and Nino Migliori (1926), who can hardly be defined as Neorealists, for in more than one case they explicitly rejected the association of their work with this tendency. Furthermore, she includes in her analysis a younger generation of photographers whose works only began to circulate in the early 1960s.

But the true problem deriving from the equation of Neorealist imagery with the exegesis of postwar cinema and literature is the scant consideration of the photo-text and the photo book which, as we shall explain, actually constituted the most genuine form of photographic expression of this trend.

Another ideologically driven thesis identifies Neorealist photography with a type of anti-academic, anti-hedonistic, and anti-elitist imagery, which was to find expression in Italy during the postwar period. According to photographer and photo-historian Italo Zannier (1932), it represented an ontogenesis of Italian photography, or the dawning of this medium developing in the aftermath of the collapse of fascism, as though there had been no notable photographic production circulating earlier in the country, while also ignoring the wealth of avant-garde experimentations produced in the postwar years. ⁸

At the beginning of this century, a decidedly revisionist interpretation has subjected photographic Neorealism to a scrutiny that was so severe as to throw its very existence into question. Such a reading, in addition to asserting the lack of any real identity of Italian postwar photography, maintains that the diffusion of photo-reportages focusing on impoverishment and destitution, far from signaling the inception of an image of political commitment, formed part of a precise strategy elaborated by the journals and magazines of the nascent illustrated press industry of assuring their own commercial success. ⁹

In actual fact, it is not a matter of establishing whether or not Neorealist photography existed or if it were ideologically overdetermined, but of considering it as a body of work addressing common subject matter and evoking a shared visual culture (rather than as a single and homogeneous tendency), while at the same time seeking to define those characteristics that distinguished it from contemporary cinematic and narrative works.

More recently, Italian postwar photography has been redefined as humanist photography by scholar Martina Caruso, and analyzed as a form of anti-fascist imagery and social protest initiated at the end of the 1920s and lasting up to the end of the 1960s. ¹⁰ Her informative book, complete with an exhaustive bibliography partially based on photographers’ biographical accounts, followed the theoretical model traced by La Photographie humaniste: 1945–1968. Autour d’Izus, Boubat, Doisneau, Ronis, ¹¹ understood as an example of “national iconography” expressed through an imaginaire d’après nature or poetic realism. Claiming this concept of humanist photography, Caruso goes on to analyze the “specificities” of postwar (Neorealist) photography by comparing it with what she describes as the more acknowledged French counterpart, only to come to the conclusion that such a notion lacks coherence, consistency, and “iconicity” when applied to Italian photography. What seems most problematic in this argument is her use of a “humanist” category, that turns into a vague and nebulous concept when it dispenses a necessary historicization and is, at the same time, much too all-encompassing when extended to comprise the years following the Cold War.

One of the first issues that needs to be addressed – something t...