As an outcome of the First World War, Italy annexed several territories long perceived by the country’s intellectual elite as part of the Italian nation, including Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and Trentino-Alto Adige. Not all of Italy’s territorial claims were met, however, prompting a resurgence of nationalist zeal to conquer additional contested areas, known as Italia irredenta, or “unredeemed Italy.” As Benito Mussolini’s Fascist party gained momentum and eventually came to power in 1922, Italian irredentism flourished, culminating in the ruthless battle for the northeastern city of Fiume, which Italy seized in 1924.   It was against this backdrop that the Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori di Architettura organized a small yet potent exhibition of photography at the First Roman Biennial in 1921, held to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Rome as Italy’s capital. Taken by Countess Maria Pasolini Ponti, a leading member of the Associazione Artistica along with architects Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini, the photographs represented so-called “minor” architecture in Rome, or non-monumental buildings such as urban residences, suburban villas, and local churches. Pasolini’s photographs were shown alongside drawings of vernacular buildings in other regions of Italy, including areas near Fiume before its annexation, as well as tapestries and hand-crafted furnishings that made plain the commonalities among Italy’s native traditions. This multi-media exhibition aimed to demonstrate the affinities that bound people of Italian culture across the peninsula and islands and provide visual evidence, as it were, for the seizure of these regions by the Italian state. Pasolini’s documentation of “minor” buildings in Rome showed the centrality of the nation’s capital to both Italian culture and the government’s territorial claims of the day. Although records of the exhibition all but ignore her participation, close analysis of Pasolini’s images reveals that her work exemplifies the critical role photography played in asserting political power and nationalist ideology in Italy on the brink of the Fascist ventennio.

Il discorso politico del Novecento non può che essere un discorso estetico [Lukács], ovvero che tenga conto dell’incredibile congiuntura di «attimi pericolosi» [Jünger] nei quali l’individuo   contemporaneo   è   messo   alla   prova   sia   sul   piano   delle   possibilità dell’esperienza, sia su quello delle condizioni di testimonianza del suo essere nel mondo. Il «potere e la sopravvivenza» [Canetti] si impongono, infatti, come concetti-limite dentro i quali le popolazioni europee del nuovo secolo – secolo di conflitti totali [Patočka – Hobsbawn] – sono chiamate a fare i conti in una realtà sempre più frammentata e esperita attraverso la mediazione di dispositivi da cui gli stessi processi antropologici, sociali e culturali vengono di fatto influenzati. Fotografia e XX secolo stabiliscono così, dinamiche etico-estetiche di superamento della «povertà dell’esperienza» [Benjamin] che trovano una peculiare condizione di possibilità nella conquista della visibilità tanto della realtà quanto del soggetto, e che raggiunge una configurazione paradigmatica nello spazio visuale sul fronte della Grande Guerra. Uno spazio che si fa «regime scopico» [Jay] e nel quale si producono sub specie bellica pratiche di potere e sperimentazioni visuali delle moderne Techniques of the Observer meccanizzate [Crary] in grado di costruire un’immagine e un racconto genealogico della contemporanea «estetizzazione della politica» [Benjamin] italiana la cui eco si propaga ancora negli anni ’20 e ’30 del secolo e del ventennio fascista. Partendo dal caso specifico della proliferazione fotografica sul fronte esteso e estetico della Grande Guerra in Italia, proviamo a proporne una riabilitazione critica che, smontando e rimontando l’esposto ideologico della fotografia, suggerisca, invece, il grado di «emancipazione dello spettatore» [Rancière] sia sul piano dell’antropologia della presenza di sé nel gesto fotografico sia su quello della storicità dell’invisibile come icona materiale del potere dell’immagine e della politicizzazione della tecnica nella cultura visuale italiana primo-novecentesca.

During the 1960s and 70s, on the wake of social and political activism, several Italian artists based their work upon a multi sensory approach to photographs conceived not just as representations, but as material objects and social agents that act upon reality producing effects. Mario Cresci was one of these artists, and the peculiarity of his contribution lies in the work he did as a member of the cross-disciplinary collective Il Politecnico. Composed of Cresci himself, along with architects and urbanists, a sociologist and a local historian, the collective was hired by local authorities in 1966 to draw the master plans of two cities in Basilicata, a rural area in southern Italy strongly hit by emigration. Based on participatory urban planning and practices of active citizenship, the master plans were commissioned in response to the disastrous effects of the modernist and rationalist urban planning ‘from above’ applied in Matera during the 1950s.

Cresci, who was trained as a graphic and product designer, defined himself as an ‘artistic operator’ directly intervening upon reality, acting within complex networks of relations among people, animals and objects. Distancing himself from the sentimentalist and aestheticising nostalgia of the Italian rural south typical of the work of photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, Cresci used his own photographs, as well as family photographs of sorts, as means to displace the notion of power as something that comes from above, and to trace models of sociability strongly related to the local identity of places and people. Though a constant dialogue among Cresci and the other members of Il Politecnico, photographs conceived as material objects with their social biographies were fully integrated into urban planning as research tools and as means of communication, as a way of encouraging historical awareness, building community identity, improving local economy, encouraging local craft.