The Photoromance by Paola Bonifazio

Author:Paola Bonifazio [Bonifazio, Paola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: photoromance; feminist; feminism; Italian studies; popular culture; comics; pulp fiction; media theory; convergance studies; fotonovela; fotoromanzi; transmedia
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

5 Birth Control in Comics

In 1976, on the pages of Corriere della Sera, Umberto Eco praised an experiment that took place in a middle school of the popular Roman neighborhood “Torre Spaccata:” a group of students had created a photoromance about one of their favorite celebrities, swimmer Novella Calligaris. “Knowing to read these new myths and discovering the teaching hidden beneath forms of entertainment is a new approach to schooling that prepares one for life,” claimed Eco.1 Written about ten years after the publication of his seminal essay on mass culture Apocalittici e integrati (Apocalypse Postponed, 1964), Eco’s short contribution sustained a positive attitude toward mass media, arguing that the form itself could be used to criticize the ideas that were purportedly imposed on its users. Speaking of photoromances, Eco’s friendly words were at odds with the widespread contempt or condescension that most scholars and journalists usually employed at the time when they talked about these magazines. In a sharp and typical critique, Luigi Compagnone in the same Corriere had only two years earlier declared that, the photoromance “does not give people to read, only to look; thus it eludes language and accustoms them not to think.”2 Writing in a column titled Risponde Compagnone (Compagnone Responds), the well-known fiction writer and journalist received many letters from readers who were offended by his words, which he quoted in a follow-up article in the same column (a few weeks later). In a highly ironic tone, Compagnone replied by dismissing resentment and complaints, and insisted that “the reader of photoromances is a passive subject because he [sic] is deprived of language.”3

However, Eco was not alone in believing that the photoromance could contribute to people’s education. Initiatives like the one in Torre Spaccata were not unique in the seventies, especially in educational contexts such as schools and activist organizations, both in Italy and abroad.4 In 1972, for example, a group of Italian architects and designers named Gruppo Strum participated in the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with three photoromances that, according to an officially released document, depicted “the present conditions of urban decay,” described “the methods which may be adopted to change the present situation,” and catalogued “all forms of urban utopias presently envisioned by designers.”5 The architects and designers used the area assigned to them as a space where the illustrated stories were distributed free of charge to visitors because, in their words, no “physical forms” were capable of communicating their thought. Between 1973 and 1976 in Ecuador, the Peace Corps also experimented with the use of “photonovels” (instead of films) to educate Ecuadorian peasants on “subjects as diverse as environmental sanitation, prenatal and postnatal nutrition, malaria control, and family planning.”6 According to a Peace Corps publication titled The Photonovel: A Tool for Development: “Filmstrips, posters, and flipcharts were abandoned, after trials, in favor of the photonovel, because of its ability to communicate a detailed message through words and vision, while entertaining at the same time.

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