Looters, Photographers, and Thieves

Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Pasquale Verdicchio

Working toward an analysis of the influence of photography on the construction of an Italian "type" to serve the mandates of the new nation in the 1860s, this book engages the work of writers and photographers who have addressed or participated in this venture. From Giovanni Verga and Italo Calvino's writings to the conceptual visual philosophy of Tommaso Campanella and Luigi Ghirri's photography. From the Arcadic gaze of Baron von Gloeden to Tina Modotti's revolutionary vision, the works analyzed in this book have all contributed in shaping our contemporary visual vocabulary. And, while Italy is at the center of my considerations, the ideas that populate this work are in many ways globally applicable and relevant.

Looters, Photographers, and Thieves seeks to contribute to the fascinating discourse on the photographic image and its specific uses in the representation of racial, ethnic and gender difference, and suggest how the isolation of images according to the dictates of power relations might influence and condition ways of seeing.

Finally, this book is meant as a locus where the images produced in the shaping of notions of citizenship and cultural relevance in nineteenth and twentieth century Italy might reveal the processes of the imaginary. As such, the arguments and images in each chapter thread through each other to propose ways by which to approach disparate subjects and forms in order to envision photographers themselves as seers rather than gazers.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 194 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½

978-1-61147-018-5 • Hardback • September 2011 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-61147-019-2 • eBook • April 2011 • $99.50 • (£77.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies

Subjects: Social Science / Regional Studies

Looters, Photographers, and Thieves

Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Working toward an analysis of the influence of photography on the construction of an Italian "type" to serve the mandates of the new nation in the 1860s, this book engages the work of writers and photographers who have addressed or participated in this venture. From Giovanni Verga and Italo Calvino's writings to the conceptual visual philosophy of Tommaso Campanella and Luigi Ghirri's photography. From the Arcadic gaze of Baron von Gloeden to Tina Modotti's revolutionary vision, the works analyzed in this book have all contributed in shaping our contemporary visual vocabulary. And, while Italy is at the center of my considerations, the ideas that populate this work are in many ways globally applicable and relevant.

Looters, Photographers, and Thieves seeks to contribute to the fascinating discourse on the photographic image and its specific uses in the representation of racial, ethnic and gender difference, and suggest how the isolation of images according to the dictates of power relations might influence and condition ways of seeing.

Finally, this book is meant as a locus where the images produced in the shaping of notions of citizenship and cultural relevance in nineteenth and twentieth century Italy might reveal the processes of the imaginary. As such, the arguments and images in each chapter thread through each other to propose ways by which to approach disparate subjects and forms in order to envision photographers themselves as seers rather than gazers.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 194 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9½

978-1-61147-018-5 • Hardback • September 2011 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-61147-019-2 • eBook • April 2011 • $99.50 • (£77.00)

Series: The Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Italian Studies

Subjects: Social Science / Regional Studies

Author

Pasquale Verdicchio teaches literature, film, and cultural studies in the Department of Literature, University of California at San Diego. He is a founding member of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Acknowledgements
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 1. The Raw and the Cooked-Up
Chapter 4 2. Photography as Literary Art
Chapter 5 3. Photographers, Looters, and Thieves: Stolen States of the Image/nation
Chapter 6 4. Giovanni Verga: Photography and Verismo
Chapter 7 5. Imagining America: The Photography of Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis
Chapter 8 6. Imaginative Contradictions: Von Gloeden's Disruptive Bodies of Representation
Chapter 9 7. Tina Modotti: Life through the Ground-glass
Chapter 10 Notes
Chapter 11 Bibliography
Chapter 12 Index

Reviews

Pasquale Verdicchio’s Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries covers a diverse array of topics, from images of wax anatomical figures to Italo Calvino’s use of the medium. The breadth of Verdicchio’s knowledge often delights, and most readers will likely discover at least one aspect of “Italian photographic culture” with which they were unfamiliar before picking up his handsome tome. ... Verdicchio’s book is beautifully illustrated and laid out. . . . I found his epilogue one of the most delightful moments of the book. Examining a photograph that he himself took on the day that his family left Italy for Canada, “Autobiographical Post Face as a Way of Conclusion” is a beautiful musing on the emotional resonance of photographs for immigrants during the twentieth century. In the pre-Skype, pre-Facebook age, portrait photographs like the one Verdicchio so generously shares with us possessed—dare I say it?—the aura of selves we struggle to sculpt inside of, or in the shadow of, or in spite of, nationalist forces attempting to whittle us down to size.
— Italian American Review