THE INVENTION OF SOUTHERNNESS
PHOTOGRAPHIC TRAVELS AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE OTHER
HALF OF ITALY 4/5
Antonella Russo & Diego Mormorio
Among the early “literary missions” to recover an image of the other half of Italy stands Conversazione in Sicilia, a novel by Elio Vittorini. Written in 1938 and published for the first time in 1941, the book was republished at the end of 1953 in a new edition, with photographs by Luigi Crocenzi and a selection of images dated 1938 by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini. It was one of the first novels published in Italy to be accompanied by photographs depicting the interior of Sicily and proposing a tougher Sicilian existence, as well as by details of artworks that are part of the everyday Sicilian landscape. Vittorini himself directed the photographers and placed the images alongside the text. Each photograph in the book “reflected and reverberated upon the others, modifying both its own meaning and those of the accompanying images.”
A similar exploration into the texture of southern culture and territory was that of Fosco Maraini. This prominent Italian intellectual began his trip down South in 1951. He began his own photographic campaign to gather material for a book ostensibly to be published in 1951, entitled Nostro Sud (Our South), but which was not published until 1980, under the title Civiltà contadina (Peasant civilization). Maraini photographed for three years, in a comprehensive way, not only the familiar southern sights and landscapes but also interiors, faces, and images that represented rituals of daily life, those pictures that he understood as “occasions for quotidianità” (everydayness), invented by southern Italians.
By the late fifties Mario Giacomelli had toured Scanno in Abruzzo. His photographs of the little village, with its inhabitants cloaked in their black costumes, traveled all over the world. These images documented Giacomelli’s fascination with southern archaic conditions and their fabulistic atmosphere. Notwithstanding the harsh comments of Italian critics, which singled out the “Scanno” series as sheer “formalist” and “calligraphic” exercise embedded in a “trite southern rhetoric,” Giacomelli continued his travels, and in the same period produced a series of photographs on the Puglia region. Like “Scanno,” these later photographs were of no ethnological use, but rather captured crowds of houses, endlessly repeating their poor materials and basic shapes, as though squeezing themselves into the image, stretching the very edges of the frame. Giacomelli records a choreography of responsive glances of street children, and wary faces of young mothers, who are both intrigued and concerned with the photographer’s attention.
Opening image:
https://www.fatamorganaweb.it/vittorini-crocenzi-e-ledizione-illustrata-di-conversazione-in-sicilia/
Il testo è facilmente traducibile on line.
La foto d'apertura mi richiama nella memoria a quelle immortalized dallo zio Giuseppino Mittiga a Platì vent'anni prima.
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