Post-war photography and anthropology and the repression of history in Italian culture

What is it about?

This essay explores the 1950s as a space of cultural transition through two bodies of iconic images: Tazio Secchiaroli’s 1958 reportage of Aichè Nanà’s striptease and Franco Pinna’s documentation of the rituals of mourning during his work in Salento with anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. Produced on the eve of the miracolo economico, these images are iconic condensations of the contrasting cultural horizons defining the national imaginary of 1950s Italy. Challenging the self-containment of these images, the essay journeys outside the frames into the surrounding historical, cultural and geographical landscapes. To explore how, through photography, Italy visually negotiated the persistence of the past and the advent of modernity, the author traces a genealogy of Italian photography from political action to paparazzismo and examines the significance of the ethnographic journey to the south. Pinna’s photography and de Martino’s ethnography emerge as sites where post-war Italy faces the intractable realities of death and the return of a “bad” past. The essay investigates how ritual mourning engages the photographic image to reveal an amnesiac culture of the spectacle exposing Italy’s relation to history as a modern repressed.

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Why is it important?

The essay argues for the centrality of photography in post-war culture as a crucial site of modernization and of repression of the historical past of fascism. Additionally, the essay reveals the specific relation of photography to modern memory and to the social process of mourning and working through the past. This ritualistic function of the medium is explored through a study of the key role photography plays in Italian anthropology and specifically in the work of Ernesto de Martino. The essay reevaluates the importance of the South in post-war Italian culture as a geography of resistance and repression and proposes a reading of the period of the "miracolo economico," Italy's full modernization, as a the triumph of historical forgetting.

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