Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

207 Pages·2011·129.13 MB·English

by  Pasquale Verdicchio

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series
in Italian Studies
General Editor: Dr. Anthony Tamburri, Dean, John D. Calandra Italian
American Institute (Queens College-CUNY)
The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies is de
voted to the publication of scholarly works on Italian literature, film, his
tory, biography, art, and culture, as well as on intercultural connections,
such as Italian-American Studies.
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On the Web at http://www.fdu.edu/fdupress
Looters, Photographers,
and Thieves
Aspects of Italian Photographic
Culture in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
Pasquale Verdicchio
FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Madison· Teaneck
Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowmanlittlefield.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Pasquale Verdicchio
Copyright © 2011 by
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Verdicchio, Pasquale, 1954-
Looters, photographers, and thieves: aspects of Italian photographic culture in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries / Pasquale Verdicchio.
p. cm. - (The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press series in Italian studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61147-018-5 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61147-019-2 (ebook)
1. Photography-Social aspects-Italy-History-19th century. 2.
Photography-Social aspects-Italy-History-2Oth century. 1. Title.
TR183.V472011
770.945'09034-dc23 2011013475
e
M,TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknow ledgments
Vll
Introduction 1
1 The Raw and the Cooked-Up: Opening Thoughts on Bodies 13
2 Photography as Literary Art 39
3 Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Stolen States of the
Image Nation 67
4 Giovanni Verga: Photography and Verismo 99
5 Imaging America: The Photography of Lewis Hine and
Jacob Riis 115
6 Imaginative Contradictions: von Gloeden's Disruptive
Bodies of Representation 131
7 Tina Modotti: Life Through the Ground -Glass 155
Conclusion 179
Bibliography 183
Index 191
About the Author 199
v
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of a slowly evolving and changing sense of see
ing. There are many people to thank for having helped me through
the process, family and friends, and many who have never known me
but whose work in art, photography, literature and cinema has been my
training ground. More concretely, I would like to thank Liesbeth van den
Bosch for her support over the years, for having made available the time
and space in which to concentrate my efforts toward the writing and
completion of these pages; with her I have shared many of the experi
ences that have formed this vision. I also thank my children, Mara and
Giuliano. Their seeing the world through new eyes taught me to open my
own. Infinite gratitude goes to my parents, Elda and Mario, for always
supporting my endeavors. Many thanks to my colleague, Stephanie Jed,
whose support and mentorship over the years has been invaluable, and to
all those I have neglected to mention but who, nevertheless, have a place
on my visual horizon.
Very early stages of some of the work contained in this book has ap
peared or will appear in essays published in the following: "Verismo,
narrator, and reality: Giovanni Verga," in Selecta: Journal of Pacific North
west Council on Foreign Languages. Vol. 12, 1991, 74-78; "Tina Modotti:
Life Through the Ground-Glass," in Dear Vocio exhibition catalogue.
University of California, San Diego, 1997. 8-19; "Imaging America: The
Photography of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis," in Public Space, Private Lives:
Race, Gender, Class and Citizenship in New York, 1890-1929. European
Contributions to American Studies, No. 53. Amsterdam: VU University
Press, 2004.333-340; "Authoring Images: Photography as Literary Art" in
Vll
Acknowledgments
Vlll
Enlightening Encounters between Photography and Italian Literature. Giorgia
Alau and Nancy Pedri editors; "Baron von Gloeden's Sicilian Arcadia" in
Descant, Sicily issue, 154 (vol. 42, No.3, Fall 2011). Michelle Alfano and
Venera Fazio, eds. I thank the editors and publishers of these publications
for their support.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to the UCSD Academic Senate
for the Research Grants that made this project possible, and the Office of
the Dean of the Arts and Humanities Division, in the person of Prof. Seth
Lerer, for support toward the publication of the manuscript.
Introd uction
Questions of nationat raciat ethnic and cultural identity have over the
last few decades settled at the center of cultural criticism in North
America and elsewhere. These questions go hand in hand with critiques
of national narratives in that they have had a defining influence in the
formation, maintenance or critique of the concept of nation since its first
manifestations in the late 1700s. The elements that go into creating param
eters of national behavior, culture and character have been the dominion
of forces both external and internal to the nation states to which they have
been applied.
The medium of photography, invented after the emergence of the
modern nation-state, found fertile ground within that discourse and was
fundamental in the creation of nationalist images and imaginaries. Pho
tography became an instrument of primary importance in the delineation
of national characteristics and the definition of anthropological categories
that might facilitate the establishment of national and international hier
archies. Photography at the service of imperialism and colonialism fur
ther upheld pseudo-scientific anthropological constructs that, to a great
extent, still exert their influence in international relations today. This sort
of documentation became a widespread practice that pitted body types
and physiognomies in a war of survival in which the ability to create and
sustain systems of classification empowered by military might and vio
lence ensured supremacy.
The efficacy of photography in establishing hierarchical types and
maintaining the definition of what was represented as being" other/' or
not quite legitimately empowered, is slightly different from that of its
1
2 Introduction
later cousin, cinematography. The photograph's lack of an apparent nar
rative structure works to its advantage as an insidious tool of speculative
narration, in the way that it purports to mirror the world and offer an ex
pansion of its meaning by its speculated images. Photography's stillness
and silence holds its subjects within a realm of unreality against which
they can apparently do little. The struggle for the possibility of a word
or action that might liberate them from being imaged also subtracts from
them the opportunity for objection. In other words, it deprives them of
agency. By this I do not mean to claim innocence for cinematography, so
I will simply say that film works in a no-less intensive manner. Cinema's
narrativity puts into prominence national images or codes that tap into a
"spectatorial familiarity" that manipulates audiences to self-identify with
a narrative context and stories.1
Although it is widely recognized that the discourse on visual culture
has mostly been formed under the influence of linguistics and semiotics,
the progress toward defining an independently active theoretical vocabu
lary for the visual has been slow. The reluctance to name Walter Benjamin
as a direct influence by a number of contemporary visual culture writers
is notable, but his presence is nevertheless evident. And, while I do not
intend to offer either a Marxist, post-structuralist or semiotic reading of
photography herein, this work is in its substance informed by Benjamin's
fundamental work on the visual. It is disingenuous to suggest that Benja
min's theories of the visual are outdated or of service only within a strictly
Marxist critical discourse. To so dismiss even his most often quoted essay,
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," would be to
purposefully undermine the evolution of visual cultural criticism and its
contemporary value.2
Benjamin's analysis of the visual may be locked within a generally
Marxist frame of reference, but it can hardly be said to be useful only
within that context. After all, the medium of photography itself is slippery
enough to resist complete manipulation by any ideological constraints.
Even in its highly capitalistic manifestation as advertising, photographic
images are ambiguous, or polyvalent enough to often contradict the very
message they seem to convey. The essay "The Work of Art" continues to
be a fundamental resource for its proposal of both photography and film's
function as conditioners of image production and reproduction. Benjamin
traces therein the development of reproduction technologies (typogra
phy, engraving, and eventually photography) for their impact on human
culture and the value system of Western art. Benjamin's analysis and dis
course bestows upon photography a potential that, in his words, "is useful
for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the 'politics of art."'3
One of Benjamin's most significant observations in this essay is in rela
tion to how photography's mechanical functions bestow upon it the abil-
Introduction 3
ity to "keep pace with speech."4 By closely linking the revolutionary de
mands in the politics of art and photography's approximation of speech
Benjamin appears to be reaching for a formulation by which photography
could be representative of a new language that is in its unfolding po
tentially revolutionary. If we consider how, in certain situations where
there has been an attempt to curtail the spread of information, whether
from war areas through the use of "embedded" journalists," or from the
oppressive situation in Tibet by the Chinese, the role of photographic im
ages relayed via new technologies has been fundamentally important as
a counter-hegemonic alternative. Further, what might at first appear to
be limitations of the medium could be read to be potentially useful and
radical representational traits. First and foremost, and not only applicable
to photography, "even the best reproduction of a work of art is lacking
in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the
place where it happens to be."5 What could at first glance appear to be a
strong de-contextualizing or de-historicizing tool may, conversely, func
tion to bestow upon photography the privilege of functioning as a class
less medium of democratic representation. This function may become
more apparent when associated with issues of ownership and representa
tional authority with regards to photographic production, re/production
and dissemination. In this case, rather than a subject's loss of impact and
diminishment of a subject's historical testimony through reproduction,
photography connotes a removed mode by which to emphasize the im
port of events and those involved in them through the reduction of their
glamorously unique value as entertainment.6
Given this, there is still, however, a distinction that must be made
between historical testimony and another type of historicity. While Ben
jamin uses the term "aura" to describe a product's historicity, we must
question how historicity is maintained if we consider that the mission of
the anthropological photograph is to set visually descriptive categories
into historical cement via photography. I would therefore like to propose
that, within an extended set of parameters, a photograph could be con
sidered a process of historical imprinting that contains a certain amount
of culturally resistant density.
While there are plenty of explicit examples of the use of photography
to support anthropological determinism, there are many less explicit ex
pressions that counter the uses of the photographic image in the service
of national programming. To this end, the present work will explore the
functionally more active and successful instigation of a certain type of
visual rhetoric directly related to the creation and definition of national
identity.
The path of this book will be delineated by the work of photographers
such as the Alinari brothers, Tina Modotti, Baron von Gloeden, Lewis