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Futurism’s Photography: From
fotodinamismo to fotomontaggio
Sarah Carey
University of California, Los Angeles
The critical discourse on photography and Italian Futurism has proven to be very limited in its scope. Giovanni Lista, one of the few critics to adequately analyze the topic, has produced several works of note: Futurismo e fotografia (1979) , I futuristi e la fotografia (1985) , Cinema e foto- grafia futurista (2001), Futurism & Photography (2001), and most recently Il futurismo nella fotografia (2009). 1 What is striking about these titles, however, is that only one actually refers to “Futurist photography” — or “fotografia futurista.” In fact, given the other (though few) scholarly studies of Futurism and photography, there seems to have been some hesitancy to qualify it as such (with some exceptions).^2 So, why has there been this sense of distacco? And why only now might we only really be able to conceive of it as its own genre? This unusual trend in scholarly discourse, it seems, mimics closely Futurism’s own rocky relationship with photography, which ranged from an initial outright distrust to a later, rather cautious acceptance that only came about on account of one critical stipulation: that Futurist photography was neither an art nor a formal and autonomous aesthetic category — it was, instead, an ideological weapon. The Futurists were only able to utilize photography towards this end, and only with the further qualification that only certain photographic forms would be acceptable for this purpose: the portrait and photo-montage. It is, in fact, the very legacy of Futurism’s appropriation of these sub-genres that allows us to begin to think critically about Futurist photography per se. Such an undertaking gives us further space in which to go beyond just a historical accounting of the shifts of photographic practice during Futurism’s roughly two decades of activity and instead examine how the Futurist approach to photography was in turn used by both the Fascist regime and Italian neorealism — a dual connection that is itself paradoxical.
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The Success and Scandal of Photodynamism
When we actually begin to think about Futurism and photography, we do not think about photography in its traditional form — as the medium that perhaps comes closest to an objective documenting of reality. All critical studies of this topic must (and do) begin with fotodinamismo — a category of photographic experimentation that refers to the experiments and theory of Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890-1960). 3 Coming on the heels of similar experiments by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, Henri Bergson’s radical new concept of time and space, and the Futurist manifesto of 1909, Bragaglia’s approach to movement was differ- entiated from chronophotography or the positivist analysis of the kinetic event through his focus on the single gesture, which was often impulsive, and the trajectory of a body’s displacement in space.^4 Reacting against the traditional relationship between realism and photography in the nineteenth-century, Bragaglia wanted to disclaim the precise, mechanical and glacial reproduction of life in order to capture life’s spontaneity and to unrealistically record reality. The shift in emphasis was a response to Bragaglia’s frustration with the artistic rigor mortis that had previously been associated with the medium of photography: the Italian tradition of photographing works of art and architectural monuments. In fact, Bragaglia’s photodynamism overcame the burdensome temporal problem of photography (that a photograph stops time and renders that moment “dead”) by playing with multiple and long exposures that gave life and vitality to the image. It finally allowed the medium to emerge from the deadlock between the demands of pictorialism and realism.^5 Bragaglia published his aesthetic theory of photodynamism in 1913 under the title Fotodinamismo futurista.^6 From the very beginning, Bragalia qualified his own type of dinamismo :
È necessario principalmente distinguere tra dinamismo e dinamismo. V’è il dinamismo effettivo, realistico, degli oggetti in evoluzione di moto reale — che, per maggior precisione, dovrebbe esser definito movimentismo — e v’è il dinamismo virtuale degli oggetti in statica del quale s’interessa la Pittura Futurista. Il nostro è movimentismo, tanto che, se non si fosse voluto precipuamente notare il dinamismo interiore della Fotodinamica, questa avrebbe dovuto dirsi Fotomovimentistica o Fotocinematica.
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The theory behind Fotodinamismo futurista represented the first real aesthetic program of avant-garde photography in Italy. 10 The labeling of his theory as fotodinamismo , however, confirmed that Bragaglia’s experi- ments were really only types of photographic Futurism — not really Futurist photography. 11 It did, however, produce several revolutionary techniques that would profoundly influence all subsequent uses of the medium on the part of the Futurists, whether they were eager to admit it or not. It would be Bragaglia, for example, to first play with the photographic portrait in his work from 1912, “Il pittore futurista Giacomo Balla , ” and with montage with images such as “Ritratto polifisionomico” and the collaborative “Ritratto” from 1913. He would also utilize the photographic postcard with his even earlier image “Salutando” from 1911 (see below), which confirmed the fundamental strategy of Futurism to refute the museum and to think of art as a type of communication within the social fabric of society.
Even though photography was one of the newest and most modern communicative mediums in Italy, and unlike Bragaglia’s zeal for its artistic possibilities, photography produced a profound sense of anxiety amongst the Futurists.When Bragaglia published Fotodinamismo futurista, in fact, they were quick to distance themselves from it. Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, Severini and Soffici all signed the following statement in 1913:
Data l’ignoranza generale in materia d’arte, e per evitare equivoci, noi Pittori futuristi dichiariamo che tutto ciò che si riferisce alla fotodinamica concerne esclusivamente delle innovazioni nel campo della fotografia. Tali richerche
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puramente fotografiche non hanno assolutamente nulla a che fare col Dinamismo plastico da noi inventato, né con qualsiasi ricerca dinamica nel dominio della pittura, della scultura e dell’architettura.^12
Boccioni’s idea of movement was not mechanical and Bragaglia instead had to rely on the mechanical apparatus of the camera in order to create visual dynamism. Likewise, the Futurist concept of movement was not static — it had to represent both a spatial and temporal continuity, which (according to the Futurist painters at least) was not possible through photographic means. The eventual and complete ex-communication of the Bragaglia brothers on the part of Boccioni and others was due, how- ever, to an even more complicated combination of several factors.^13 First, photography did not fit in with their already established aesthetic pro- gram, which in some sense was highly traditional as it relied on painting, sculpture, and architecture. 14 Secondly, both photography and cinema were considered cold media. They froze the élan vital, bringing back only mechanical reproductions that were devoid of life. Photography was still considered a language of its own, but by transforming reality into an immutable sign, it became something objectively different from “the lived.” For Marinetti and Boccioni in particular, photography was not only an intrinsically static and necromorphic language but it was inca- pable of translating life’s complexity and ephemeral state of being. Lastly, for Futurists the artist should be the sole interlocutor between aesthetic experience and the real world, a concept that was not reconcilable with photography’s necessary reliance on the mechanical functioning of the camera lens. In order to eventually assimilate photography into the movement, Futurists had to heat up the medium from its frozen and mechanized state. They did this through a complete reconsideration of the medium’s effectiveness as a tool (for, unlike Bragaglia, it was never considered an art) as they incorporated only certain aspects of photography and photographic style into traditional media (including works of Futurist literature). Photography would remain a tool for reading reality and an expressive model for art yet it would be excluded totally as an aesthetic medium of its own. What we now consider to be Futurist photography, in fact, relies on two sub-genres of photographic practice that were the easiest to fit into Futurism’s ideological program: the Futurist portrait and photographic montage.
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The self-portrait, in particular, further solved photography’s onto- logical problem by positing the man as both artist and subject in complete control of the finished product.^17 Perhaps the best examples of Futurist self-portraiture come from Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) (see below). In 1915, Depero symbolically expressed his adherence to the art-life-action ideology of Futurism with a series of images that express the three basic attitudes of Futurism: the aesthetic of surprise, the carefree detachment from life and the aggressiveness of the avant-garde. For Marinetti, the fist was in fact the supreme argument of the cultural struggle of Futurism against the inert resistance of passatismo. By translating into an image the atavistic practice of the Futurist artist, the gestural and physiognomic figurations of Depero gave to Futurism an irrefutably visual objectivity. Depero’s research into photography helped create the “figure” of the artist by using celebrated archetypes — the mise-en-scene of the artist as saint, called upon to serve the artistic ideals of the avant-garde.
Among the new generation of Futurists, it was Depero who finally embraced photography as an ideological instrument and took it, along- side Balla, on to the photo-performance. Along with appropriating the portrait for their aesthetic and ideological program, Futurism’s involvement with other avant-garde movements in Europe (such as purism, Dada, surrealism, and Bauhaus) produced three different strains of photographic practice within the movement: abstraction, photo-collage and photo-montage, even if there already existed a tradition in these fields before the 1920s. Tato (1896-1974) (the pseudonym of Guglielmo Sansoni) would be the
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foremost Futurist to experiment with abstraction through his practice of “camouflaging” objects. On the other hand, the violence and the concision of the Futurist manifestoes, which Marinetti considered a form of art, instead found their iconographical equivalent in montage. 18 In Italy, therefore, more than in any other country, there were two ways to think about montage. 19 On the one hand, it was produced through the lens of the camera, while on the other, it was tactile — physically cutting out and putting into contrast different fragments of the visible meant that elements from reality seemed to explode out of the organic unity of the work. The first such example of this type of montage came as early as Carlo Carrà’s Ufficiale francese che osserva le mosse del nemico of
- The re-juxtaposition of visual elements enabled the representation of another, revolutionary reality (this was especially appealing to the Futurists). The compositional elements of dynamism were maintained through diagonals, broken lines, asymmetrical shapes and unbalanced juxtapositions. Futurists gave themselves over completely to this latter aspect of montage. The materialistic version of photomontage used in Futurism, however, was only developed under the very heavy influence of foreign avant-garde movements (which will become a critical quali- fication, especially with the advent and popularity of Fascism during these decades). This is clearly evident in the early literary output of the Futurist movement: the power of combining multiple images and words was used to further solidify their manifestos and to adorn many of the covers of their literary works. Despite its closer though still wary involvement in photographic practice in the 1920s, it would not be until 1930 that Marinetti and Tato would publish their “Manifesto della fotografia futurista,” which stressed that through the possibilities of photography, the dramatic and other-worldly aspects of objects could produce the illusion of a superior reality. Strangely enough, the manifesto begins by paying homage to Bragaglia’s theory of photodynamism — the former target of their scorn. But the intended purpose of the mani- festo’s publication was to consider sixteen new possibilities with regard to photography, not old ones (already implying the passé nature of fotodinamismo ).
La fotografia di un paesaggio, quella di una persona o di un gruppo di persone, ottenute con un’armonia, una minuzia di particolari ed una tipicità tali da far dire: “Sembra un
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16° l’arte fotografica degli oggetti camuffati, intesa a svilup- pare l’arte dei camuffamenti di guerra che ha lo scopo di illudere gli osservatori aerei. Tutte queste ricerche hanno lo scopo di far sempre più sconfinare la scienza fotografica nell’arte pura e favorirne automaticamente lo sviluppo nel campo della fisica, della chimica e della guerra.^20
Like Bragaglia’s earlier claims with photodynamism, the Futurists clearly distanced their photographic aesthetics from the quotidian, realistic and (by now) banal pictorial tendencies that utilize the medium. No men- tion is made, however, of montage or abstract photography or any of the other experimental techniques that had been so successful the previous year at the international exhibit in Stockholm called “Film und Foto” in which many Futurists had participated.^21 This was a strategic move on the part of Marinetti, who wanted to react against the accusations of Bolshevism and giudaismo cosmopolita that the Fascism regime would try to use to liquidate Futurism.To defend the Futurist movement meant to continually repeat that Futurism was at the service of Fascism and that its artistic aims were the opposite of foreign avant-garde movements. In spite of the manifesto’s publication, Futurists would still be uneasy with the idea of photography as an art. Consider that in 1932 Bruno Sanzin (1906-1994) would write in his preface to the catalog for the “Mostra Fotografica Futurista” in Trieste: “Il fotografo, così com’è inteso abitualmente, non può esser considerato artista, quando tutta la sua bravura consiste nel far scattare a tempo e luogo l’obiettivo; nello stesso modo che non costituisce fatto artistico il colpire a segno di un tiratore.” 22 The “problem” of photographic art is resolved with Futurist photography, as Sanzin clarifies:
Il problema dell’ arte fotografica è risolto con la fotografia futurista, che nelle varie composizioni, nelle rappre- sentazioni dinamiche, nelle molteplici situazioni che il manifesto chiarisce e di altre ancora magari, per le quali ognuno può portare il suo contributo, mette gli artefici nel dovere di porre le loro cognizioni techniche a completo ser- vizio delle ricerche creatrici, che orientano la fotografia ad una funzione precisa di emotività esclusivamente raggiunta ed assolutamente inalienabile all’assunzione fotografica.
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Fotografia orientata vero il suo assoluto. Fotografia pura. 23
With strong nods to the elements outlined in the 1930 manifesto, Sanzin elaborates how the multi-varied Futurist aesthetic theory of photog- raphy was not only dynamic but also a device at the complete service of “research.” Futurism’s relationship with photography remains distant in the manifesto, which specifies that photography should be used at the service of science and as a technique for waging ideological war, while Sanzin seems to indicate that this trend in photographic practice aims at bringing Futurist photography that much closer to its pure and absolute aesthetic function.
A Troublesome and Enduring Legacy
The advent of Fascism in Italy, which had already begun to complicate the relationship between culture and social context in the 1920s by setting up a hostile climate for the avant-garde, ended up provoking an absurd phenomenon: the complete adherence of Futurism to the totalitarian regime. The collusion between the two, which was mostly Marinetti’s desire, was an erroneous strategy. Marinetti thought not only that it was a way to ensure the survival of the Futurist movement but that it would also assure it a hegemonic role in the culture of the new Italy that was promised by Mussolini. Futurist art per se would not be utilized at all by the regime. Tato’s composition on the cover of La Stirpe , for example, celebrated Mussolini as supreme head of country, while some of his other works were tied into the colonial aspirations of the regime. By participating in its visual strategies, some Futurists thought they would be opposing the cultural conformity of the regime by intervening in a political image that was destined to create consensus among the crowds of Fascist Italy. Fascism would instead impose a cul- tural climate of bourgeois restoration that was diametrically opposed to the aspirations of Futurism. On the other hand, the legacy of Futurism’s experimentation with photographic montage would be taken up for the purposes of creating a Fascist iconography and the Futurist portrait would became one of the iconographical legacies of Futurism in the Fascist regime.^24 Futurism’s use of both portraiture and photo-montage provides an important connection to Italian Fascism and the regime’s reli- ance on visual spectacle. The centrality of Marinetti in many Futurist
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The legacy of the Futurist technique of photo-montage and its fur- ther experiments with photo-plasticity are made clear in two important Fascist exhibitions in 1932 that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Garibaldi (“Mostra Garibaldiana”) and the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome (“Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista”). These events created the visual manifestation of the Fascist regime’s imagined history through a complex system of photographic display, connecting the revolutionary events of the Italian Risorgimento to those of the Fascist era.^27 In the same year, the Istituto L.U.C.E. also published a mas- sive volume of 516 images entitled L’Italia fascista in cammino. The work was an assembly of photographs, montages and graphics that sought to summarize the activities and ideology of Mussolini. Its visual aesthetic drew heavily on the previous work of the Futurists by attributing to every page the maximum level of visual impact and persuasion in its use of montage. Ironically, photography’s role in Italian society after the fall of the Fascist regime had its roots in Fascism’s ideological program: the medium had been a way to inform, to instruct and to benefit civil society by educating it socially, politically and culturally.^28 Through these functions, photography became an integral part of a complex system of communication on the national level as it played a role in the represen- tation of the new Italy and the new Italians that the regime wanted to portray. It was this same sort of representational operation that neorealists hoped to employ through visual culture — not a manipulated image of Italy, however, but the real image of the country in the wake of the war.^29 Just as Fascism did before, Italian neorealism continued to rely on Futurism’s legacy of montage as a way to approach reality. Like the Futurists, many neorealists profoundly distrusted photog- raphy — though in the former case it was an artistic evaluation and in the latter it was the complex system of visual propaganda under Fascism that had become suspect. Like Bragaglia’s early experiments with foto- dinamismo, the primary aim of the neorealist aesthetic was to capture a slice-of-life through the documenting of a spontaneous moment. The burning question of how best to represent reality was answered in part by montage and its ties to cinematic culture. As theorized by Sergei Eisenstein, montage was actually considered one of the most “real” ways of narrating and thus held enormous promise for neorealist theory. Two images (or elements) placed together could combine into a new con- cept, a new quality, that arose out of that juxtaposition. The neorealist
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movement eventually looked to photographic montage as a way to fully represent the real, objective world, while it systematically (and paradoxi- cally) avoided invasive montage in its films. 30 Publications such as Omnibus , which showcased a highly modern style of journalism by utilizing the power of photography to create political and social satire, and Elio Vittorini’s short-lived but extremely influential periodical Il Politecnico (1945-1947) provided visual proof of the neorealist re-appropriation of montage. It was the combination or “approaching” of disparate images that produced meaning along with the added signification of the written text, a new process that eventually led Vittorini himself to re-publish his novel Conversazione in Sicilia as an illustrated version in 1953. The neorealist approach to photography thus changed a fundamental problem of visual representation: the fragmentary and passive nature of the individual image was resolved by the combina- tion of multiple photographs and their proximity to the written word. This led to a proliferation of works such as the racconto fotografico and the photo-documentary. It is not only the legacy of Futurist montage to endure in post-war photographic practice, however: variations on photographs from the era of Futurism also emerged as new takes on photodynamism, abstraction and portraiture — all of which sought to confirm the new face of Italy. Futurism’s idiosyncratic use of photography produced reverbera- tions that lasted well into the post-war period. We can trace the effects even further to the experimental poetics of poesia visiva in the 1960s and 70s and the resilience of the emblematic image in the post-modern era. Because of this heritage, are we now able to call it the legacy of Futurist photography? Can Futurism’s outright rejection of photography as an art be its own way to propose a separate genre? Furthermore, is it really helpful to try to find an autonomous category of photography as we look at the influence of Futurism on later movements? Does Futurist photography really exist? It is only now that we can say that it does, since we can look retroactively at the Futurist tradition of portraiture and montage as emblematic of a dramatic shift in visual culture in the early twentieth-century. By transgressing the inherent pretense of realism that is at the very heart of photography, Futurist photography seized upon the subjectivity and mutability of the image in order to construct the very identity of Futurism — an aesthetic approach that would endure far longer than the Futurists could have ever imagined.
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Futurism. Also useful is Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Bragaglia’s Futurist Photodynamism (London: Studio International, 1975).
- Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista (Torino: Einaudi, 1970). A recent English translation is Futurist Photodynamism , trans. and ed. Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/modernity 15, no. 2 (2008): 363-379.
- Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo , 13.
- Ibid.
- Younger brother Arturo Bragaglia would continue the work in photo- dynamism well into the 1920s and 1930s. He later explored so-called spirit photographs, which revealed secret aspects of reality that were concealed behind the appearances of the visible world and which allowed him to focus on the forces of the subconscious in a pre-surrealist manner — a technique that seemed much more appealing to Futurism as it moved into its second stage.
- See Italo Zannier, “Evoluzione della saggistica sulla fotografia: dal manuale tecnico alla proposta di un’estetica specifica,” in Cultura fotografica in Italia: antologia di testi sulla fotografia, 1839-1949, ed. Italo Zannier and Paolo Costantini (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1985), 19-21.
- Lista, Futuristi , 72.
- Quoted in Buscaroli Fabbri et. al, Fotografia , 7.
- See especially Lista, Cinema , 173, as well as his entry in Celant and Maraniello, Vertigo , 50-51.
- See Giulio Carlo Argan’s introduction to the 1970 Einaudi edition of Bragaglia’s Fotodinamismo futurista.
- For a discussion of portraiture and its emblematic status, see Lista, Futurismo , 98, and Cinema , 173-74.
- The connections between identity, identification and photography can of course be traced back to Cesare Lombroso’s use of the medium in the late nineteenth-century for the purposes of categorizing and classifying certain “types” of people — in his case, the criminal or mentally ill — according to their physiognomic characteristics.
- Lista, Cinema , 145-46.
- Ibid., 181. As an artistic choice, montage had actually already been legitimated by Bragaglia, who had published two examples in 1913 and 1914. Younger brother Arturo Bragaglia called his own process “montaggio in sand- wich” — the superimposition of two or three negatives, with a similar effect to a dissolve between two cinematic sequences. Arturo was, in fact, re-integrated into the Futurist movement and his rather archaic kind of montage began to be placed side by side with the more modern conception of montage in the 1920s.
- Ibid., 211.
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- Reproduced in Lista, Futurismo , 325-326.
- Lista, Cinema , 232.
- Bruno Sanzin, preface, Mostra fotografica futurista (ceramiche): esposizione permanente delle belle arti (Trieste: Tip. P.N.F., 1932), no pagination.
- Ibid.
- Lista, Cinema , 190-191.
- See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). An important discussion of Fascist photography can also be found in Zannier, 70 anni di fotografia (Modena: Punto e virgola, 1978).
- Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist , 185.
- For an excellent discussion of these two exhibitions, see Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary — Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
- On the connection between Fascist and neorealist photographic practice, see Giuseppe Pinna’s “Italia, Realismo, Neorealismo: la comunicazione visuale nella nuova società multimediale,” in NeoRealismo. La nuova immagine in Italia 1932-1960, ed. Enrica Viganò (Milano: Admira, 2006).
- The extensive use of photography in Fascist propaganda made some neorealist thinkers skeptical - notably Italo Calvino. Drawing upon his direct experience with the propagandistic photographs of Mussolini during the regime, Calvino doubted the photographic image’s connection to reality: the photo- graph had an appearance of reality and authenticity that was essentially false and superficial. See Lucia Re, “Calvino e l’enigma della fotografia,” Italo Calvino y la cultura de Italia. Jornadas internacionales de estudios italianos 8 (2007): 115-128; 121.
- See Eisenstein, The Film Sense , trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
