Short description:

Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape explores the impact of photography at a pivotal moment in Italian architecture and culture, focusing on the period between 1910 and the mid-1970s.

Long description:

Photography, Architecture, and the Modern Italian Landscape explores the impact of photography at a pivotal moment in Italian architecture and culture, focusing on the period between 1910 and the mid-1970s.

The book analyzes architectural photographs taken by Italian cultural figures who helped transform the Italian landscape into what we know today. This study charts the oscillation of Italians’ ideas about what progress signified. For example, the book demonstrates that for writers and artists familiar with ancient ideas about civilization in 1910, the Roman countryside exemplified the contradictions inherent in primitivism. On the one hand, their photographs praised the region’s primordial beauty, yet their images condemned the crudeness of local living conditions. More broadly, it traces the history of primitivism and photography in Italy to show how cultural leaders’ alarm at the nation’s pre-modern living conditions, their aspiration to modernize them, and their grasp of photography to catalyze the process helped forge the modern Italian landscape—its monuments, housing, infrastructure, and natural environments.  At the same time, it explores a vibrant period in photographic history when the advent of photographic reproduction as a commercial process developed into a medium with its own visual style capable of shaping ideas about modernity. This new image-making and reproduction technology empowered Italy’s cultural leaders not simply to represent the Italian landscape through photography but to determine how it developed.

Of interest to researchers and students from a range of disciplines, modern architecture, photography, and Italian studies, this book demonstrates the power of art to transform society and to reformulate our ideas of progress.

Table of Contents:

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: On Primitivism and Progress

Chapter 1: “Fortified” Images of a Primitive Landscape: Arnaldo Cervesato’s Latina Tellus, 1910

Chapter 2: A Photographic Survey of the Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura, c. 1905–1935

Chapter 3: A Modernist Vision of Rural Italian Architecture

Chapter 4: “Unconventional Progress”: Photography in Matera, 1945–1980

Afterword

Bibliography

Index