The Italian photographic book 1931-1941

Publisher's description

The volume examines the most interesting and innovative photographic books that appeared in Italy in the decade in which "modern" photography developed in our country. A boundary publishing industry, which oscillates between autonomous visual research (starting from the rediscovered experimentalism in the futurist context) and a 'functional' use of photographic illustration, in the two parallel and often crossed fields of advertising and propaganda.

The large Italian companies (Olivetti, Fiat, Snia Viscosa, Montecatini, etc.) recognized in those years the importance of linking their image to innovative graphic projects, in which photography plays a much more effective role than drawing; at the same time the fascist regime, having concluded its first phase of expansion and consolidation, discovers the power of photography and avant-garde techniques, especially photomontage, in the context of those promotional and self-celebrating practices which it increasingly needs to drive and maintain consent.

The book collects and illustrates about one hundred works, which emerge from an almost forgotten (if not removed), but conspicuous and often high-level editorial production, many of which due to the work of leading artists of the period, including Antonio Boggeri, Erberto Carboni, Franco Grignani, Bruno Munari, Giuseppe Pagano, Luigi Veronesi: tracing, we can say, the brief and intense history of graphic and photographic modernism in Italy.