ACROSS ITALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY. On the in-between landscape, art, architecture and archetypes, and around the exhibition “Viaggio in Italia”

Abstract

ACROSS ITALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY. On the in-between landscape, art, architecture and archetypes, and around the exhibition “Viaggio in Italia” investigates the genesis of the so-called Italian landscape school of photography, a new kind of photography that originated in the 1980s in Italy. Despite its definition, it is quite intriguing that it is neither possible to talk about a school nor about a canonical interpretation of the landscape. The photographers involved in the exhibition Viaggio in Italia, organized by Luigi Ghirri with Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati in 1984 at the Pinacoteca Provinciale in Bari come from different regions, but in the same historical moment, they all have a similar dispersed need to examine the transformations occurred in Italy in the aftermath of WWII, an urgency brought up by historical, social, architectural, and material changes of the landscape. The image of Italy cannot be anymore the monumental one of the Italian postcards from the fascist regime, because the cities are expanding, the peripheries are growing, the urban textures are transforming. In these years of reconstruction when districts of office blocks, factories, social housing were arising in a newly growing urban sprawl, a new attention towards the landscape is given by architects, urbanists, and theoreticians such as Bernardo Secchi, Bruno Zevi and Italo Zannier. Having a background in architecture, literature, and philosophy photographers such as Guido Guidi, Gabriele Basilico, Carlo Garzia and Gianni Leone (just to name a few), started to investigate the territory, measure it, and relate to it through the camera. For the exhibition, the photographers of Viaggio in Italia use the topos of the Italienische Reise as a reference that must be flipped and dismantled: the spectacular is substituted by the daily, the single striking images by the series of photographs, the centers by the outskirts. The “new photography” stands in-between archetypes, mythology, iconography in visual arts, history of photography, architecture, urbanism, and environmentalism.
Viaggio in Italia represents a watershed, a last collective attempt to redefine the image of Italy. This research aims at uncovering the socio-economical dynamics underlying this exceptional and unrepeated event, at deepening its understanding by contextualizing it in a broader context as well as at suggesting a novel interpretation of the phenomenon through the analysis of apparently marginal unrelated factors such as narrative tools and shared emotions.

Short biography

Melissa Destino (Bari, 1984) is a curator, researcher, and writer with a background in contemporary art, design, photography. She is currently working as artistic coordinator at Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art Theory and Cultural studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.