Photographing Mussolini

The Making of a Political Icon

Alessandra Antola Swan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030565053
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030565060
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

This pioneering book offers the first account of the work of the photographers, both official and freelance, who contributed to the forging of Mussolini's image. It departs from the practice of using photographs purely for illustration and places them instead at the centre of the analysis. Throughout the 1930s photographs of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini were chosen with much care by the regime. They were deployed to highlight those physical traits - the piercing eyes, protruding jaw, shaved head - that were meant to evoke the Duce's strength, determination and innate sense of leadership in the mind of his contemporaries.  The chapters in this volume explore the photographic image in the socio-political context of the time and shows how it was a significant contributor to the development of Italian mass culture between the two world wars.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. Antola SwanPhotographing MussoliniItalian and Italian American Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56506-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alessandra Antola Swan¹

(1)

Independent Author, London, UK

End Abstract

Reflecting on the task of classifying photography, Roland Barthes notes that photographs have something tautological about them in that they cannot be separated from what they represent, as if both photograph and referent were ‘affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures’.¹ Barthes’s dramatic use of words expresses the difficulty in separating the various layers of meaning produced by photographs while Stephen Shore explains that photographs can be read on different levels:

To begin with, it is a physical object, a print. On this print is an image, an illusion of a window on to the world. It is on this level that we usually read a picture and discover its content […]. Embedded in this level is another that contains signals to our mind’s perceptual apparatus. It gives ‘spin’ to what the image depicts and how it is organised.²

Reading the photograph requires maintaining the illusory power of the image before the eyes and independent from the photograph as physical object thus, in Graham Clark’s words making the photograph ‘one of the most complex and most problematic forms of representation’.³ When adopted as a means of propaganda, the specific and intrinsic characteristic of duality can lead photographs to be perceived as ‘truthful’ and therefore a direct channel to the real. This peculiarity, along with being infinitely and easily reproducible, made photography one of the preferred media in the art of political persuasion in the twentieth century. The dictatorial regimes that developed in Europe between the two world wars were not based on violence alone and crucial to their establishment and endurance was a seductive language used to project power through the developing mass media.⁴ As well as fear, repression and control there was also entertainment, celebration and a certain level of creativity. The emergence of the masses as active participants in public life, following the revolutions of the eighteenth century and the struggles for citizenship of the nineteenth, corresponded to the development of a new language of political persuasion.

In his celebrated work Psychologie des foules,⁵ Gustave Le Bon referred to the modern era with the developing industrial and urban world characterised by the widening of political suffrage, albeit to men only as one of the ‘crowds’.⁶ Thus, in a radically changing world, political power, institutions and law were no longer legitimised through the divine authority of monarchy as, progressively, sovereignty required the support of the people.⁷ Jeffrey Schnapp notes that modern states and political movements, including those that were authoritarian, populist or conservative, employed the same language for persuasion of the masses because public opinion, either in the form of popular support, consent, or the absence of opposition, played a crucial role.⁸ According to David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, a characteristic of modernisation is ‘the increasing presence in society of mass-reproduced leisure goods such as films, paperbacks, glossy magazines, radio programs, and records all offered to consumers through the market’.⁹ Visual imagery and media spectacle were contributory factors in the construction of Fascist aesthetic politics that administered culture to the Italian people. Political image-making was promoted by the regime to ensure that its ideological presence permeated the daily life of the nation.¹⁰ While written and spoken propaganda was spread through publishing, press and radio, in the ‘New Vision’ era,¹¹ the visual became essential to the cultural construction of social and political life. Traditional forms of fine art such as painting, sculpture and architecture, together with newer and modern methods of communication, mainly photography and film, were strategically put to use by the Fascist regime to translate values into a simplified and comprehensible language made up of slogans, logos and acronyms aimed at transmitting complex ideas for maximum effect with minimum effort.¹² The masses had to not only be instructed on political, economic, cultural, moral and health issues but also made familiar with symbols, beliefs and myths aimed at promoting social cohesion and favouring public participation in national matters.¹³

In an increasingly standardised and impersonal world, it seemed relevant to respond to collective needs through a leader with an impressive appearance and original personality. The continued legitimacy of those governing depended on the capacity of a leader to create a public image that incarnated individuality while responding to collective values. The ideal leader was an individual with vision, who through communication could shape public opinion. Through the photographic process the Fascist leader’s idealised body and features could be moulded into an immediately recognisable physical model, often reinforced through text. ‘The word itself is everything: it is enough to say Duce for everyone to see, imprinted in their memory, his unmistakable profile, male, rugged, decisive, Roman, with an unforgettable stare’, wrote the illustrator Sandro Biazzi in 1941 in a celebratory review of the Duce’s better known and most significant portraits.¹⁴

This book explores the photographic image of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and investigates the impact of the medium of photography on the construction of his personality cult. The work of photographers and the management and distribution of photographs are together analysed to shed light on the evolution of his image. The book engages with the question of Fascism’s relation to modernity, highlighting the status and role of photography within a totalitarian regime as a key contributor to a developing system of mass communications. Mussolini was the founder of the National Fascist Party and prime minister of Italy from 1922 and effectively, with the abolition of other parties, dictator or Duce,¹⁵ from 1925 until 1943, with an epilogue lasting until 1945.¹⁶ He was the first modern dictator to be the object of systematic promotion in a variety of spheres including the visual media. His face, enhanced through composition and post-production, was ‘iconic’ in the sense that, like religious icons, it elicited reverence and devotion, and also being all-pervasive, had become so familiar as to be instantly recognisable, like a trademark.¹⁷

The distribution of images of him played an important role in the projection of his power, both at home and abroad. His photographs appeared across a wide range of printed newspapers and magazines and can be differentiated on the basis of style and genre as well as periods (Figs. 1.1–1.2).

Fig. 1.1

Benito Mussolini full page illustration, Tempo, 26 October 1939, Mussolini at the Congress of Naples, on 24 October 1922

Fig. 1.2

Book cover for the biography by Giorgio Pini 1939. Original image: Mussolini salutes the crowd in Turin, 14 May 1939

The sheer quantity of images allowed different publics to ‘read’ Mussolini and feel him as part of their world. For example, children’s comics on the one hand and women’s magazines on the other deployed images of the dictator that were in tune with the emphases and expectations of those areas of the press.¹⁸ In the context of historic charismatic personalities, modern theories of visuality can link concepts of seeing to particular political discourses and social influences.¹⁹

Over the past three decades, a few chapter-length accounts of Mussolini with photographs have been published as well as illustrated biographies supported by images from salient passages of his political ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Setting the Scene
• Part II. Production
• Part III. Audiencing
• Part IV. Modalities
• Back Matter