A triptych of exhibitions spread across half of Italy tell the experiences and stories of lens artists: the former model turned war reporter, the regime portraitist obsessed with bodies and the ante litteram VIP hunter
Three exhibitions of twentieth-century photography. After Venice, Milan, and simultaneously with the great exhibition in London, Elisabeth “Lee” Miller arrives in Turin in an exhibition, curated by Walter Guadagnini, which celebrates ten years of activity of the Camera/Italian Center for Photography. Like Artemisia or Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller is one of those artists for whom the biography ended up becoming more popular than the works (it is no coincidence that all three were the subjects of a film).
Gorgeous from an early age, Miller studied art in New York after having been a child model, even naked, for her father, an amateur photographer, and having suffered a sexual assault that would mark her character. The chance meeting with Condé Nast, great patron of fashion publishing, led her to pose for famous photographers such as Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene with whom she appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair, but also in an advertisement for sanitary pads which made the right-thinking people brand her as a miscreant. Better to photograph, and in an artistic way, than to be photographed: Lee therefore goes to Paris to learn from the prince of Dada-Surrealist photographers, Man Ray, of whom she becomes his muse and lover. But once she learned what there was to learn, she also distanced herself from Ray, demanding to express herself on her own. She does it in Egypt where she follows her first husband, reinventing the charm of the place in images that are somewhere between dreamy and enigmatic. He also gets bored of Egypt, returns to Paris, where he hangs out with Picasso, Paul Eluard, Dora Maar, who adore him, especially the wealthy collector Sir Roger Penrose, a point of reference for British surrealism. The two go to live in London where Lee documents the Nazi bombings, significantly changing the direction of his photography. As a war reporter who nevertheless continues to publish for Condé Nast, he follows the Allied advance from Normandy to the occupation of Germany, taking off his military suit only in the famous photograph of his colleague David Scherman, perhaps another lover, in which he is bathing in the tub of Hitler’s house in Munich.
However, the war is not over for Lee: the discovery of the extermination camps shocks her doubly, first because it makes her understand human degeneration in a way she had not yet experienced, then because the publishers refuse to publish such impressive photographs. Exhausted from a nervous point of view, she returns to London where she marries Penrose and resumes cultivating artistic friendships, as a country noblewoman who knows what good living is. Beyond the novel, however, Miller was an original photographer with great creative finesse, as the Turin exhibition also demonstrates.
In Rome, at the Del Roscio foundation, the nudes of (1908-1969), the most emblematically fascist – he was a convinced republican also involved in the infamous Having arrived in Rome in 1932 from his native Brazil, Luxardo established himself as a portraitist in the wake of the Hungarian Ghitta Carell, a specialist in soft effects and beautifying retouching, competing with the more aristocratic and refined Arturo Ghergo for a new clientele capable of having an enormous impact on the imagination of Italians, that of the actors of Cinecittà.
Luxardo’s most interesting photography, however, is the one that does not leave the confines of the studio which strives, by exalting the often faceless nudity of women and even more of men, to provide an aesthetic correspondent to the fascist ideal that dreamed of the birth of a new Latin lineage no longer “pasta-makers”, in continuity with the impeccable one of the ancient statues. Susan Sontag’s a priori classification weighed on this type of photography, ideologically close to the Olympic physicality of Leni Riefensthal, Hitler’s pupil, but also to the certainly not restorative ones of Robert Mapplethorpe, who interpreted it as a manifestation of racist and reactionary kitsch. Even admitting the validity of certain opinions, Luxardo’s nudes are still an exemplary document of the moral contradiction of fascism for which certain bodily apologia was considered pornography when not incitement to the “inverted” tendency, as homosexuality was defined at the time.
In Milan, Glenda Cinquegrana’s gallery commemorates the centenary of the birth of Tazio Secchiaroli (1925-1998), an essential figure not only of photography, but also of the customs of his time, with a small exhibition visible until 13 December. Born in Rome in the Centocelle neighborhood, to which he would always remain attached, Secchiaroli approached the profession of photographer as a proletarian, learning at the VEDO agency of Adolfo Porry Pastorel, pioneer of Italian photojournalism. His political militancy alongside the Communist Party, which led him to take moving photographs among the most desperate Roman people, was also the basis of the experience that changed his way of seeing photography, when with his friend Franco Pinna he was involved in filming a police charge against a group of demonstrators and fled on a motorbike to avoid being stopped (1952).
It is the discovery of a photography that had never been seen before, spectacular and disconcerting, in which the center of everything becomes the action-reaction that occurs between those who photograph and those who do not want it to be done. Secchiaroli has the genius of applying this new technique to a field that enjoyed great popularity in the illustrated press, the social news, completely revolutionizing it: no longer famous people posing, but stolen images in which more often than not they lose their aplomb, like small populist revenges against show business stars, men of power and the wealthy in general who would only like to be admired by those who cannot like them. Secchiaroli is the main inspirer of Paparazzo, the Fellini character in La Dolce vita (1960) who, together with the Via Veneto in which he works, becomes the myth of a fatuous and enjoyable world, always in doubt between avoiding the news and seeking it at all costs.
With the same conviction with which he chases Ava Gardner and fights with Walter Chiari in one of his most famous exploits, Secchiaroli understands when the game ends, no longer finding interest in something that had squandered its novelty.
He then begins a new career as a cinema photographer, behind Fellini of whom he proposes, particularly on the set of 8 and 1/2, unforgettable images, with Sophia Loren following him from 1964, and much more that can only be guessed at in the Milanese exhibition. But why isn’t Rome, an ungrateful mother, celebrating Secchiaroli properly?
