Italian Humanist Photography From Fascism to the Cold War by Martina Caruso

Author:Martina Caruso
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474246941
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 3.12 Giuseppe Cavalli, Puglia, c. 1950, published in Subjektive Fotografie, 1952. Courtesy Archivio Giuseppe Cavalli.

An empty chair is the protagonist of a quiet, meditative photograph on a sunny southern day, far away from the chaotic scenes of the neorealist genre exemplified in the photojournalist style explored earlier. Needles from a pine tree frame the photograph on the upper edge. The soft diffuse light characteristic of Cavalli’s photographs was due to the milk-like light of the Adriatic coast, different from the dark, more contrasted, light of the Tyrrhenian (West) coast.100 Cavalli came from Puglia originally, and moved to Senigallia, remaining on the east coast and able to continue photographing in his acquired style. Puglia was published in the German photographer Otto Steinert’s annual catalogue Subjektive Fotografie, a veritable bible for Italian photographers in the early 1950s for La Bussola and La Gondola alike.101 Cavalli promoted the work of young photographers and in December 1953 he founded Misa, an off-shoot of La Bussola, in Senigallia.102 Its members would include Mario Giacomelli (the group’s treasurer), Alfredo Camisa, and Piergiorgio Branzi among others. Although the club maintained Cavalli’s literary-cultural aura, all three photographers developed a high-contrast photography, in which they focused on social issues while paying attention to their formal expression.

Branzi had read Christ Stopped at Eboli and knew about the young peasant author and poet Rocco Scotellaro, who became the mayor of Tricarico in 1946 at the age of twenty-three and had recently published a novel, Southern Peasants (Contadini del Sud) in 1954. Driven by a spirit of curiosity and adventure, Branzi traveled from Florence to the south of Italy in 1955 on a Guzzi motorbike with his brother-in-law.103 Subject to the prejudices of his time, Branzi recalls Cavalli remarking, “Well if you’ve gone to the South, you must have become a Communist.” Branzi was not a Communist. Although keeping his worship private and separate from his practice, he had a strong Catholic faith, connected to the radical intelligentsia that grew in Florence after the war. A progressive existential Catholic ideology, embodied in particular by Giorgio La Pira (under whom Branzi studied law in Florence in the early 1950s) and Don Milani, influenced him. Branzi observed that he did not want to dwell on the poverty of the South, but was interested in photographing the dignity of the people. He said he was looking for their “humanity.” One of his few photographs from his trip (he only had twelve photographs on his Rolleiflex film) shows a young boy with his back to the camera, his thumb pressed against the wall (Figure 3.13).

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