757
races), as well as some episodes of the life of the people
with their processions, festivals, and customs. Their
special language showed their friendship with painters
and artists of the Parisian milieu: think of the use of
photography in Degas, or the studies of motion carried
out by Marey and Muybridge, who certainly infl uenced
the two brothers’ technique.
Around 1890, Giuseppe Beltrami captured different
aspects of fi n de siècle Milan by shooting every sort of
character in the streets of the city: humble clochards,
travelling salesmen, ladies with their wet-nurses and
children, business men with cigars and waistcoats.
Beltrami worked with a Kodak n.1, the fi rst apparatus
for taking snapshots that used fi lm on a roll. He would
stop at a certain point in the centre of Milan, between
piazza Duomo and piazza della Scala, and from there he
would shoot whatever happened to pass by the camera’s
lens. His images, which were also collected in albums,
were an enormous success and were presented at the
most important exhibits of the period.
Luca Comerio, photographer and fi lm industry pro-
fessional, was the author of important photography on
the Milanese turmoil of May 1898. The demonstrators,
the barricades, the military troops at work putting down
the fi ghting, were all documented in his photographs
and then published in L’Illustrazione Italiana with the
fi rst photomechanical processes. He also did other im-
portant documentaries, including coverage of the War
with Libia in 1912.
Vittorio Sella deserves mention among the Italian
photographers of snapshots. This great photographer
of the mountains was the author of documentaries on
the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Arctic Circle between
1887 and 1904.
The photographic industry witnessed a phase of re-
markable expansion, especially in Milan, a city rooted
in industrial development. Here, the following fi rms
sprang up: Oscar Pettazzi, who sold camera obscura,
light-sensitive materials and treatises on photography;
Salmoiraghi, Lamperti and Garbagnati, Koristka (fa-
mous for his lenses); Cappelli (famous for his plates).
The spread of amateurism encouraged the fi rst as-
sociations of photographers and the proliferation of
journals. In Rome in 1888 the Amateur Photographers
Association was born; in 1889, the Italian Photographic
Society and the Lombard Photographic Circle were
created in Florence and Milan respectively; in 1896
the Bolognese Photographic Circle was founded in
Bologna, as was the Camera Club in Naples; in 1899
the Subalpine Photographic Society was founded in
Turin, and it incorporated the older Italian Photographic
Union, founded in Turin in 1879. In the publishing fi eld,
apart from the aforementioned Camera Oscura and
Bullettino, new journals appeared: Amatori fotografi in
Rome, in Milan Il Dilettante di fotografi a in 1890, theRivista scientifi co-artistica di fotografi a, a periodical
of the Lombard Photographic Circle, in 1892, and Il
Progresso Fotografi co in 1894.
The exhibits and conferences in this period show that
there were different trends in Italian photography. Next
to the traditional photography of the professional atelier,
the work of learned amateurs was making headway.
These photographers worked outside the studio and put
forward new forms of language which barely exploited
the characteristic techniques of photography. Amateurs
and professionals alike were involved in the progres-
sive rise of pictorialism, a trend that fi rst appeared in
Italy at the Exhibition in Turin in 1898. Here, artistic
photography was fi rst separated from technical and
commercial photography, thus claiming its cultural role.
Optics, chemistry and mechanics were subordinated
to artistic creation. Infl uenced by the theories of Peter
Henry Emerson, photographers like Guido Rey (1860–
1935), Cesare Schiapparelli, Enrico Grosso, Wilhem
von Gloeden, Luigi Cavadini (1878–1962) and Mario
Nunes Vais (1856–1932) came to the fore. Experimenta-
tion with a new artistic language led to the use of new
printing techniques like bromoil and gum bichromate.
The Turin Exhibition took place at the same time as 1st
Italian Congress on Photography, which confronted the
problem of the social role and recognition of the pho-
tographer. At the National and International Exhibition
in Florence in 1899, there was also the 2nd Congress on
Italian photography, and photographers saw the work of
Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Demachy, H. P. Robinson, and
the Camera Club of Vienna. At the Exhibition of Artistic
Photography, promoted within the First International
Exposition of Modern Decorative Arts held in Turin
in 1902, more non-Italian photographers were present,
in particular, members of the Photo Club of Paris. The
Italian photographers on exhibit were of high quality,
and clearly showed, together with the triumph of the
art nouveau style, that Italian artistic photography had
reached a fully mature phase.
Silvia Paoli
See also: Daguerreotype; Genre; Wet Collodion
Positive Processes; and Calotype and Talbotype.Further Reading
Becchetti, Piero, Fotografi e fotografi a in Italia 1839–1880,
Rome: Quasar, 1978.
Benassati, Giuseppina and Tromellini, Angela, Fotografi a &
fotografi a Bologna 1839–1900, Bologna: Grafi s, 1992.
Bertelli, Carlo and Bollati, Giulio (eds.), L’immagine fotografi -
ca 1845–1945, in Storia d’Italia. Annali 2, Turin: Einaudi,
1979.
Bonetti, Maria Francesca and Maffi oli, Monica (eds.), L’Italia
d’argento 1839/1859. Storia del dagherrotipo in Italia, Flo-
rence: Alinari, 2003.
Costantini, Paolo and Zannier, Italo, Cultura fotografi ca in Italia.ITALY
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