Rivista scientifica della Società italiana per lo studio della fotografia Unico periodico in Italia di ambito scientifico interamente dedicato agli studi di fotografia, RSF. Rivista di studi di fotografia ha ottenuto il riconoscimento della classe A dall’ANVUR - Agenzia nazionale di valutazione del sistema universitario e della ricerca, ai fini dell’abilitazione scientifica nazionale per il reclutamento di ricercatori e docenti universitari, in due macrosettori, Storia dell’arte (10/B1) e Cinema, fotografia e televisione (10/C1), oltre al riconoscimento di ‘scientificità’ per il settore di Storia contemporanea (11/A3). La rivista è rivolta a un ampio ed eterogeneo pubblico di ricercatori universitari e indipendenti, conservatori e appassionati. Si propone come strumento di aggiornamento sulle ricerche di fotografia, con particolare attenzione al trattamento specialistico delle sue teorie e della sua storia, all’innovazione metodologica e al dialogo interdisciplinare fra saperi. RSF. Rivista di studi di fotografia è indicizzata in DOAJ, EBSCO, Google Scholar, ProQuest, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. Direttrice scientifica Tiziana Serena Questa rivista è pubblicata sotto una licenza Creative Commons 4.0 License.
This article offers an introduction to the study of photographic color as a distinctive element of the medium’s language, with a special focus on post-WWII Italy. The first paragraph provides a brief outline of international color photography in the 20th century, a highly dynamic field affected by unsystematic debates and a substantial lack of theoretical studies. The erratic responses to color among Italian photographers, historians, and critics since the 1930s, as well as the general acceptance of color beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, are the subject of the second paragraph. The final section addresses the methodological challenges posed by the study of color for a possible reconsideration of the general history of Italian photography. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-2
Il numero 14 di “RSF. Rivista di studi di fotografia” presenta una sezione monografica, curata da Antonello Frongia e Adele Milozzi, su Il colore fotografico in Italia, che ha l’ambizione di aprire il dibattito su un tema rimasto fino ad oggi pressoché inesplorato in ambito italiano. Sebbene non manchino all’estero esempi di studi ed esposizioni, anche recenti, su un argomento così ampio e sfaccettato, la storiografia italiana ha trattato solo occasionalmente la storia del fotocolore e le questioni teoriche ad essa collegate, dalla colorazione manuale alla diffusione popolare della fotografia a colori nel secondo dopoguerra, fino alla revisione dei linguaggi del contemporaneo sulla base della fotocromia come elemento che ha permesso una diversa riflessione sull’idea di forma. L’ampia introduzione e la bibliografia di riferimento assemblata dai curatori bene puntualizzano gli aspetti critici e metodologici sottesi al trattamento del tema, tra colore inventato e colore descrittivo, tra astrazione e documentazione, tracciando un primo affresco su possibili periodizzazioni a partire dal secondo dopoguerra. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-1
Verso un’arte a colori: fotografia, riproduzione e prassi editoriali in Italia (1937-1943)
This contribution aims at exploring the shift imparted on the Italian system of art reproduction by the introduction of modern color photography technologies in the second half of the 1930s. Color early challenged the tradition of black-and-white reproduction, by subverting consolidated practices of production, reception and fruition of the images, in dialogue with the European experiences. The analysis focuses on how the materiality of color – in osmotic interrelationship with the productive, cultural and social context – affected photographic reproduction and the form of art publishing, paving the way for the developments of decades to come. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-3
Il primato critico di Giuseppe Turroni: la genesi e il contributo della Guida all’estetica della fotografia a colori (1963)
First published in 1963, Giuseppe Turroni’s Guida all’estetica della fotografia a colori was a pioneering attempt to chart the emergence of color photography in Italy at the height of the nation’s economic boom and to provide the critical tools for assessing its aesthetic and cultural values. This article retraces the genesis of the ‘guide’ in the articles and books published by Turroni since 1958 (in parallel with his work as film critic) and discusses the peculiar character of his pedagogical critique. Focusing on works of amateurs and professionals rather than established artists, the book advocated photographic color as a harbinger of beauty, as a tool of self-cultivation and civic growth against the accusations of “hedonism” and aesthetization levelled by radical critics of the left. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-7
Oltre il ‘visivo’: colore e sperimentazione in Paolo Monti
Paolo Monti (1908-1982) developed an original approach to color photography and its features, studying all the possibilities of creating a personal way of seeing in ‘color’. Passionate and deeply involved in the artistic and photographic culture of his time, attentive to the international context, during his career Monti never gave up experimenting all the aspects of color photography, with negatives, positives, slides, photograms and chemigrams, rejecting all conventional and naturalistic use of color. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-5
La documentazione a colori del patrimonio culturale: il progetto didattico per i fotografi dell’amministrazione delle Belle Arti (1955-1956)
In the aftermath of World War II, Italy’s reconstruction was extensively documented by the photographic sections of cultural heritage institutions. Published in books and exhibited in public displays, these photographs formed a new visual archive that played a crucial role in the broader strategy (supported by the European Recovery or Marshall Plan) to reframe the image of the country. As part of this program, museums and the Soprintendenze received new photographic equipment and materials from the United States; concurrently, the model of the American “didactic museum” was actively promoted. Following these developments, in 1955-1956 the Direzione Generale Antichità e Belle Arti in Rome envisaged a new course on color photography for the documentation of the cultural heritage: a pioneering, but short-lived attempt to foster the knowledge of the new technique and to meet the new demands of international scholars, publishers, and prospective travellers. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-4
Tra natura, luce e astrazione: modulazioni del colore nella fotografia di Giorgio Lotti
In parallel with his international career as a photojournalist, Giorgio Lotti (1937) has developed a decades-long exploration of photographic abstraction, hitherto unstudied. Stimulated by Ernst Haas’s intuitions on the combination of color and movement and receptive to the work of Italian photographers such as Franco Fontana, since the 1960s Lotti has investigated sea and lake surfaces as the most suitable scenarios for capturing chromatic and textural effects of light that question the indexical character of the medium. As a development of this line of research, beginning in the early 1980s he has experimented with color and multiple exposures in the portrayal of 20th century artists. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-8
Ritorno sul luogo del delitto: la fotografia a colori di Vincenzo Balocchi
Vincenzo Balocchi (Florence, 1892-1975), was an amateur photographer who worked from the 1910s to the 1960s and took part in some of the most important photographic groups of that period. An engineer with a classical education, he was praised by critics for his technical competence and classicism. An expert in the industrial production of photomechanical color prints since 1920, he started using color in his private work only in the late 1950s and did so for about a decade, reinterpreting earlier black and white pictures and exploring photographic language through variants. This essay investigates this original color work. placing it within the broader debate about this technique. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-6
Fotografia e istituzioni museali: Venturi, Cantalamessa, Bariola e la nascita dell’archivio fotografico delle Gallerie Estensi
Unpublished documents found in the historical archive of the Galleria Estense in Modena led to rediscover the history of the gallery’s photographic collection, today located in Palazzo Coccapani. The examination of letters and invoices allows to retrace the events that led to the gathering of the first group of photographs at the turn of the 20th century. These evidences also help to clarify the important role of Adolfo Venturi, Giulio Cantalamessa and Giulio Bariola who, during their terms in office, have been in many ways pioneers in introducing photography into museum practices. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-10
Il rapporto fra Adolfo Venturi e Carlo Brogi
This article reconstructs the relationship between Adolfo Venturi, a pioneer of modern art history in Italy, and Carlo Brogi, one of the leading photographers of his time in Florence. Drawing on newly discovered archival material, it is now possible to affirm that, at least around the turn of the 20th century, there was a significant and fruitful exchange between the two. Previously unpublished photographs and correspondence reveal that Venturi took a keen interest in Brogi’s work, which, in turn, was substantially shaped by the scholar’s support, guidance, and direct commissions. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-11
Il numero 13 di “RSF. Rivista di studi di fotografia” ospita una parte monografica dedicata al tema Fotografia, teatro, performance, curata da Cosimo Chiarelli e Giovanni Fiorentino, che si prefigge di fare il punto sulla situazione di questo ambito di ricerca in Italia, dopo alcuni eventi periodizzanti che ne hanno comportato una progressiva ridefinizione. Nel lontano 2006 una giornata di studi, Fotografia e teatralità, realizzata a San Miniato (Pisa), con un volume di atti curato da Massimo Agus e Cosimo Chiarelli, faceva per la prima volta il punto sul tema, chiamando a raccolta studiosi e appassionati che, a vario titolo, stavano riflettendo sulle relazioni ineludibili fra la fotografia e il teatro. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-1
“Il cielo non è facile”: gli spazi del colore nello stile documentario di Guido Guidi
This article proposes an analysis of color as a fundamental element of language in the work of Italian photographer Guido Guidi (1941), from his ‘experimental’ beginnings in the second half of the 1960s to his definitive adoption of a “documentary style” two decades later. Lacking sources, debates or theories on the progressive shift from black-and- white to chromatic practices in Italian photographic culture of this period, the study proposes a close reading of key works and photographic sequences by the author, relating them to archival materials, aspects of the international photographic discourse and statements on the theme of color elaborated retrospectively by Guidi in recent publications. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-9
John Szarkowski: la ricerca formale come metodo percettivo-esplorativo
The main criticism of John Szarkowski came from postmodernists, who, seeing him as a representative of institutional reality, had a limited view of his work. While postmodernists believe that the meaning of photography is purely discursive, Szarkowski argues that photography communicates visually. Remarkably, Victor Burgin and Szarkowski affirm the same idea: the subject of photography is the “act of looking.” However, while for Burgin this subject, although conceived almost unconsciously, is the “starting point” of photography, for Szarkowski, through formal research, it is its “destination.” DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-12
Fotografia, teatro, performance: iconografie, dispositivi e pratiche di scambio dagli anni Sessanta a oggi. Introduzione
This text introduces the monographic issue dedicated to the relationship between photography, theatre, and the performing arts, focusing in particular on the Italian context from the 1960s onwards. While they address different theoretical questions and specific case studies, as a whole these essays set out to explore some of the potentialities arising from the intersection of these two forms of expression: theatre photography, between document and interpretation of the stage; the use of images as dramaturgical support; the visual device of performance; the remediation of the image in contemporary productions; the performativity of the gaze. In addition to presenting the texts of this issue, this introduction aims to contextualize the main questions, evolution, and perspectives of this multifaceted field of study. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-2
La Fondation arabe pour l’image : une approche historiographique singulière ? Le cas Van Leo
This text aims to contribute to the debate concerning the Arab Image Foundation (FAI), one of the most important photographic archive in the Middle East region, which works to preserve and promote the region’s photographic heritage. Through an analysis of the cultural productions carried out by the FAI around the work of the Armenian-Egyptian photographer Van Leo (1921-2002), the aim is to show that these creative gestures contribute to the FAI’s historiographical ambition and thus to the production of knowledge around photography in a historical and regional perspective. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2023-13
Dispositivo Mulas: le fotografie per Vita di Galileo di Giorgio Strehler tra documento e modello
For the staging of Brecht’s Life of Galileo directed by Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan in 1963-1964, Ugo Mulas developed a rigorous model of photographic documentation based on a strictly serial or ‘automatic’ protocol, which marked a point of no return in the history of stage photography. Based on archival materials from various institutions, this essay analyzes the background and development of Mulas’ approach to Brecht’s play in the general framework of theatre documentation and as new starting point for his subsequent research. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-3
Il teatro come esperienza: Tony D’Urso fotografo dell’Odin Teatret
In 1973, Italian photographer Tony D’Urso met Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret and photographed the performance Min Fars Hus from above, lurking in a hidden place. The following year, D’Urso took part in the organization of the first barters in Carpignano Salentino, which he photographed mixing documentary, stage, and anthropological photography. Two books, one from 1977 and one from 1990 (reissued 2000), collect the traces of the years that followed, during which D’Urso experimented with theatre as a place of experience and relationship. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-5
La spettralità della scena. La performance fotografica tra documento, drammaturgia e digital liveness in The Dead di Città di Ebla
Starting from the analysis of the performance The Dead (Città di Ebla, 2010-2012), the essay intends to measure the media-performative implications that the various devices produced within the performance, including in particular the technique of real time shooting and the co-presence of screens, produce in the relationship between theatre and photography, and in the concept of “liveness”. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-10
Il corpo dell’immagine: il documento fotografico nello spettacolo contemporaneo italiano
The article focuses on the role of photography in contemporary performing arts when it occurs as a document, considering the recent dialogue between contemporary archival theory, media and performance studies. This investigation emphasizes how the encounter with performance provides original theoretical tools for the study of photographic documents today: on their performative nature, the materiality of their bodies, and their non-dichotomous relationship with reality and fiction. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-8
Dal teatro al fotolibro: The Living Book (1971) e La storia di un soldato di Dario Fo (1979)
Focusing on two Italian case studies of the 1970s – The Living Book (1971) and La storia di un soldato di Dario Fo (1979) – this article suggests a critical approach to viewing photobooks devoted to theatre as a new kind of performative act. In these works, the photographer and performers collaborate to create a communicative object that captures the theatrical experience within their pages. The article highlights the various visual and editorial choices made in the narration of each book and contextualizes them within their respective cultural settings, while at the same time acknowledging the crucial role that photobooks play in the process of re-semantization of a theatrical event. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-4
Nello sguardo dell’incontro: teatro, paesaggio e natura nei racconti fotografici di Francesco Galli
The article aims to conduct a preliminary survey of the relationship between nature and theatre in Francesco Galli’s photographic research. After graduating in architecture, Galli started working on ethnographic and sports reportages at the end of 1980s. Then, he devoted himself to theatre photography concurrently with his works on “landscape portraits”. By drawing from Galli’s systematic notes on his own activity, this inquiry explores the concept of invisibility, the potentialities of the gaze as foundational to encounters and relationships, and the documentary value of theatre images. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-6
Archivi fotografici tra descrizione e rappresentazione. Il modulo Esplora i fondi della Fondazione Federico Zeri
Esplora i fondi is a descriptive database of the art-historical photographic collections held at the Federico Zeri Foundation. The article traces its genesis, focuses on the theoretical principles on which it is based, and illustrates its functionality and usability. The challenge that the system tries to meet is to combine archival and cataloguing approaches, providing users with both the specific characteristics of the individual items and the critical context of the collections in which they are sedimented, for the benefit of art-historical research and a more indepth knowledge of the archive. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-12
Il teatro di ricerca contemporaneo italiano come laboratorio di sperimentazione del ‘fotografico’
The use of photography in dramaturgy, often considered as an epiphenomenon in the composite framework of medial theatre, can be seen instead as the precipitate of a modern culture based on images, which have transformed the performing arts on an aesthetic and epistemological level. This paper analyzes the panorama of Italian experimental theatre of the last four decades and specifically the realm of the socalled “Photographic Theatre”, in which a number of practices are put to work in a general process of photographic homoiosis. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-9
Disfare l’immagine: performance e fotografia in Liquidi di Lucia Poli (1976)
The article suggests an analysis of the relationship between performance and photography in the piece Liquidi by Lucia Poli (1976). After introducing the intersection between the field of photography and experimental theatre in the 1970s, the analysis will focus on the performance Liquidi, which stages a model, played by Lucia Poli, and a photographer during a photo shoot. The piece conceives photography as a medium that only reproduces erotic images of the female body. The performance, the performativity, is instead viewed as an escape strategy, a chance for the body to “undo” its traditional image and “portray” itself otherwise. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-7
L’Associazione degli Amatori di Fotografia in Roma e il suo “Bollettino” (1889-1896): editoria periodica e dilettantismo in Italia
This paper discusses the Association of Amateurs of Photography in Rome (founded in 1888 and active until about 1922) and its Bulletin (published between May 1889 and February 1896). Similarly to other societies and periodicals abroad, both played a significant role in the modernization of Italian photographic culture at the turn of the 20th century. Based on contemporary bibliographic sources, the paper reconstructs the Association’s genesis, goals and organization, as well as the Bulletin’s importance for the dissemination of technical information and new ideas about the medium. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-14
Photographs and Books as Research Objects. Enhancing and Expanding the Fotobibliothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
The Library and the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) are collaborating to enhance and expand their special collection of books devoted to the theory and history of photography. The KHI Fotobibliothek features literature published from 1840 to the present day, selected following an international and transdisciplinary approach. The aim is to create a comprehensive and original collection that can become a key ‘reference library’, a sort of ‘one-stop shop’ repository for international studies potentially connected with all the leading libraries worldwide. DOI: 10.4424/rsf2022-13
La militanza globale della expanded photography
La fotografia come dimensione agentiva delle immagini