either as an artistic practice for amateurs or as a commercially based handicraft. Such a
persistent marginalization marked Italian photography with a sense of provincialism.
Changes were initiated in the 1940s by the Gruppo degli otto and by Domus, both
promoting innovation to bring Italian photography up to date with the European
avantgardes. Also in the immediate postwar years, a number of new publications were
launched including Tempo Illustrato, Oggi, L’Europeo directed by Arrigo Benedetti and,
in 1950, Epoca by Mondadori. Yet while developments in journalism and neorealism in
cinema (Rossellini, De Sica, Zavattini) aroused the enthusiasm of certain photographers
who recognized the sociological significance of photography, the Bussola Group,
founded by Giuseppe Cavalli in 1947, was rejecting documentary photography and
prolonging the diatribe, based on Crocean aesthetics, of photography as art. This
polarization between documentary and artistic photography would continue to
characterize the activity of Italian photographers for decades. In the 1950s the magazine
Ferrania, written by the photographers Guido Bezzola, Alfredo Ornano and Luigi
Veronesi, was the point of reference for Cavallian neo-formalists, while Pannunzio’s
magazine Il Mondo and Elio Vittorini’s Il Politecnico were publishing documentary
social realist images.
In this period, Italian publishing and illustrated journalism reached European levels
and, encouraged by the economic miracle which promoted a new market in visual
advertising, talented photographers like Mario De Biasi, Carlo Bavagnoli and Ugo Mulas
came to light. In Venice, rising stars of new Italian photography such as Paolo Monti,
Gianni Berengo-Gardin and Fulvio Roiter—who are still working today—were emerging
and formed the group La Gondola. Their individual work differs greatly, ranging from
the documentary, historicizing approach on the one hand through to the expression of a
purely personal and ahistorical sensibility on the other. Berengo-Gardin (b. 1930), who
worked as a freelance reporter, was much admired by Cesare Zavattini. The most
eloquent examples of Berengo-Gardin’s work are his images of Venice, his series of
photographs from India, and his pictures of Luzzara, the village he visited two decades
before Strand. Roiter (b. 1926) is famous for his evocative images of Venice, most of
which have been published in books, such as Essere Venezia (1977)—an all-colour
volume which sold 150,000 copies in three years in English, French, German and Italian.
In the 1960s there was increasing acknowledgement of the existence of a ‘culture’ of
photography and photographers finally emerged from what had been a peripheral ghetto.
The international magazine Camera, directed by Romeo Martinez, acted as an
intermediary between foreign masters—Haas, Cartier-Bresson, Steichen, Weston—and
Italian photographers. Within this ferment of ideas and styles, it was the work of
Berengo-Gardin, Franco Fontana, Mario Giacomelli and Giorgio Lotti, all with a
background in photojournalism, which displayed the greatest formal resolution.
Giacomelli (b. 1925) and Fontana (b. 1933) developed landscape photography in
particular, playing with the relationship between precise representation and abstraction.
Their work is exemplified by the early black and white, deeply contrasted images of the
Marche by Giacomelli, and by Fontana’s later colour landscapes of Basilicata, which at
first glance often appear to be abstract patterns of colour and geometric shapes. Of the
two, Fontana has been the most commercially and internationally successful, exhibiting
constantly worldwide throughout the 1970s to the 1990s. Giacomelli’s work is of a more
documentary nature, but is formally highly crafted nonetheless. Always in black and
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