La fotografia, la stagione dei movimenti, l’emergere dell’identità come tema politico

Abstract

The concept of identity has become an essential part of the political vocabulary in the Sixties and Seventies, with the Black movement in the US, the ethnic movements in many countries, the development of feminism. The role of photography was a contested terrain, between the critique of the supposed fake truth of objectivity and the emphasis on the expressive value of the medium. The ambivalence toward photography in the Italian New Left, as demonstrated by the opposite choices of two daily newspapers, “il manifesto” and “Lotta continua”, is a good starting point for a discussion about the role of the medium, and its relation with the radical redesign of the media system, in the period when “identity” emerged as a new political.

DOI: 10.4424/rsf2021-6