Over one hundred original photographs from private collections and national historical funds such as i Alinari brothers, Museum of Cinema and Photography of Turin, Archive Museum of Historical Photography of Rome and the archives of MART of Trento and Rovereto.
The exhibition investigates, over the span of half a century, the way in which the futurists have taken possession of the photographic language to fix the invisible of the vital impulse and to transcribe reality as creation and becoming.
Divided into four sections, from the destruction of mimesis as a naturalist illusion to the innovative research of the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, «Futurist Photography» includes the formalized photodynamism of the Bragaglia brothers, the self-portraits of
Depero, Tato's photomontages, up to the photo-performances, in harmony with the best European avant-gardes, contestant and revolutionary, libertarian and eccentric, hyperbolic and irrecoverable for the canons of bourgeois society.
The first section documents the directions taken by photography at the beginning of the XNUMXth century to destroy the illusion of a naturalistic mimesis and reveal itself as an artificial image, no longer a reflection of reality but constructed in the studio: the
so-called «spirit photo» which was often deliberately playful and ironic, i.e. openly proposed as a game; double or split image to capture the motion sequence; the search for a formal scanning through which functional reality tends to become only an abstract rhythm of light or lines; the multiple portrait, made with the mirror camera: the photomontage, with fantastic, humorous or playful ends, in which Boccioni immediately glimpses an image of the ontological and Pirandello-like multiplicity of being.
To the invention of thephotodynamism», or photography of movement as energy in action by the brothers Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia, the second section is dedicated as one of the most significant contributions of futurism to the history of
photography. Exploring the photographic ability to fix a sudden gesture in terms of pure energy that transcends body mass, the brothers intuit the possibility of capturing only the luminous trail which they interpret as verification of a
spiritual reality, as a manifestation of the vital force that inhabits matter. The photo-portrait that the futurists used as a vehicle of communication but also as a possibility of restoring the emblematic image of themselves as artists
avant-garde is the theme of the third study. Compensating for the passive recording of reality by the photographic instrument, they invented the photo-performance in which the artist delivers an image to the lens
self-deprecating as a histrionic and clownish figure.
The fourth section is dedicated to the research of the XNUMXs and XNUMXs in which the futurists, in total harmony with the best European avant-gardes and placing themselves as a foreign body to the so-called «fascist culture», practiced the
photomontage, the photo-collage, the composition of objects, the play of lights or mirrors, the shadow theater, the magical, mysterious or allusive symbols of things surprised in the key of still life, the metaphor of luminous values, the laying in
costume as an allegorical paradox, gazes placed outside the iconography of the regime. On display, the photos selected from thirty-one authors from the early twentieth century to the end of the forties:
Vittorio Alinari (Florence, 1859/Livorno, 1932); Mario Bellusi (Ferrara, 1893/Rome, 1955); Francesco Benvenuti (Florence, 1863/Viareggio, 1919); Italo Bertoglio (Turin, 1871/1963), Piero Luigi Boccardi (Intra, 1890/Turin, 1971); Umberto Boccioni (Reggio di Calabria, 1882/Verona, 1916); Gustavo Ettore Bonaventura (Verona, 1882/Rome, 1966); Anton Giulio Bragaglia (Frosinone, 1890/Rome, 1962) and Arturo Bragaglia (Frosinone, 1893/Rome, 1962); Mario
Castagneri (Alessandria, 1892/ Milan, 1940); Gianni Croce (Lodi, 1896/Piacenza, 1981); Tito D'Alessandri (Rome, 1864/1942); Ferruccio Antonio Demanins (Trieste, 1903/1944); Fortunato Depero (Fondo, 1892/Rovereto, 1960); Mario Gabinio (Turin, 1871/1938); Majorino Gramaglia (Turin, 1895/1971); Giovanni Giuseppe Guarnieri (Locorotondo, 1892/Mendoza, 1976); Emanuele Lomiry (Ancona, 1902/Rome, 1988); Elio Luxardo (Sorocaba, 1908/Milan, 1969); Carlo Maiorana; Filippo Masoero (Milan, 1894/Rome, 1969); Bruno Munari
(Badia, 1907/Milan, 1998); Francesco Negri (Tromello in Nomellina, 1841/Casale Monferrato, 1924); Mario Nunes Vais (Florence 1856/1932); Ivo Pacetti (Figline 1901/Albissola, 1970); Giulio Parisio (Naples, 1891/1967); Henry
Pedrotti (Trento, 1905/Bolzano, 1965); Guido Pellegrini (Milan, 1886/1955); Tato alias Guglielmo Sansoni (Bologna, 1896/Rome, 1974); Thayaht alias Ernesto Michahelles (Florence, 1893/Marina di Pietrasanta, 1959; Enrico Unterveger
(Trent, 1876/1959); Wanda Wulz (Trieste, 1903/1984).
