Description
Book SynopsisStillness in Motion brings together the writing of scholars, theorists, and artists on the uneasy relationship between Italian culture and photography. Highlighting the depth and complexity of the Italian contribution to the technology and practice of photography, this collection offers essays, interviews, and theoretical reflections at the intersection of comparative, visual, and cultural studies. Its chapters, illustrated with more than 130 black and white images and an eight-page colour section, explore how Italian literature, cinema, popular culture, and politics have engaged with the medium of photography over the course of time.
The collection includes topics such as Futurism’s ambivalent relationship to photography, the influence of American photography on Italian neorealist cinema, and the connection between the photograph and Duchamp’s concept of the Readymade. With contributions from writer and theorist Umberto Eco, photographer Franco Vaccari, a
Table of Contents
Introduction (Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli) Part One: National Beginnings and Modernist Fears 1. Photography and the Construction of Italian National Identity (Roberta Valtorta, with Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli) 2. Local Colour and the Grey Aura of Modernity: Photography, Literature, and the Social Sciences in Fin-de-Siecle Italy (Maria Grazia Lolla) 3. Eternal Speed/Omnipresent Immobility: Futurism and Photography (Giuliana Minghelli) Part Two: Modern Memory Objects: Social Histories of the Photograph 4. The Peripatetic Portrait: Exchange and Performance in Migration Photographs at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Giorgia Alu) 5. Presente! The Latent Memory of Italy's Great War in its Photographic Portraits (Luca Cottini) Part Three: Photography and the Acceleration of Modernity: Reality-Commodity-Violence 6. Italian Neo-Realism between Cinema and Photography (Barbara Grespi) 7. Photographic Excess: "Scandalous" Photography in Film and Literature after the Boom (Sarah Patricia Hill) 8. Images of Violence, Violence of Images: The "Years of Lead" and the Practice of Armed Struggle between Photography and Video (Christian Uva) Part Four: Critiques of Modernity: Stillness, Motion, and the Ethics of Seeing 9. The Body in and of the Image in the Films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi (Robert Lumley) 10. Intersections of Photography, Writing, and Landscape: The Italian Landscape Photobook from Ghirri to Fossati and Messori (Marina Spunta) Part Five: Documents and Experiences 11. A Photograph (Umberto Eco) 12. Essays: Photography and the Ready-Made and Apollo and Daphne: A Myth for Photography (Franco Vaccari); Interview with Franco Vaccari (Giuliana Minghelli)
