Études photographiques 30 | 2012 Paul Strand / Kodak / Robert Taft versus Beaumont Newhall Un Paese (1955) and the Challenge of Mass Culture Maria Antonella Pelizzari Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3483 ISSN: 1777-5302 Publisher Société française de photographie Printed version Date of publication: 20 December 2012 ISBN: 9782911961304 ISSN: 1270-9050 Electronic reference Maria Antonella Pelizzari, « Un Paese (1955) and the Challenge of Mass Culture », Études photographiques [Online], 30 | 2012, Online since 25 June 2014, connection on 04 May 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesphotographiques/3483 This text was automatically generated on 4 May 2019. Propriété intellectuelle Un Paese (1955) and the Challenge of Mass Culture 1 Un Paese (1955) and the Challenge of Mass Culture Maria Antonella Pelizzari The author wishes to thank Sally Stein, for her suggestions at an early stage of the manuscript; the staff at the Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, the Zavattini Archive in Rome, and the Getty Research Institute, where the Newhall Archive is conserved; and Amanda Bock and Peter Barberie, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 1 Un Paese, the first ever significant photobook in Italy, was launched in April 1955, by a left-leaning publisher in Turin, Giulio Einaudi.1 It was coauthored by the American photographer Paul Strand and the Italian screenwriter Cesare Zavattini. Un Paese was the first volume of a new series, titled Italia Mia, where Zavattini, renowned for films such as Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief, intended to bring his neorealist credo, based on the everyday life of common people, into an editorial project centred on photography.2 The spirit of the series, and of this book in particular, reflected a much broader involvement on the part of postwar intellectuals towards a rediscovery of the country through regional narratives. Un Paese focused on Luzzara, Zavattini’s hometown by the Po River, and this title effectively conveyed the double notion of ‘a village’ and ‘a country.’3 2 Strand, who had relocated to France in 1949, was introduced to Zavattini through Virgilio Tosi, a film critic who was familiar with Strand’s political engagement through his recent film Native Land (1942).4 Despite the linguistic barrier and the obviously different cultural background, the two artists shared a fascination with the ordinary lives of small communities. Strand cultivated a pet project called ‘a portrait of a village’5 – a subject that was quintessentially American, initially conceived during his trip to New Mexico in the early 1930s, and inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. His first photobook, Time in New England (1950), was an effort to identify the traditional features of his culture in a region where he recognized values of endurance and democracy;6 La France de Profil (1952), coauthored with the poet Claude Roy, was the beginning of his journey into postwar rural communities, as he had fled the United States, pressured by the attacks of Senator McCarthy’s anticommunist politics, and determined to plant ‘the American seed’7 elsewhere. Strand’s meeting with Zavattini Études photographiques, 30 | 2012 Un Paese (1955) and the Challenge of Mass Culture 2 – an intellectual who viewed his own country through the microcosm of a village – encouraged him to translate his own values of small town America into a foreign land. 3 Un Paese became a potent vehicle for these two artists to express something close to their heart through the voices and faces of villagers living in a peripheral Italy. But what was that ‘something,’ and how was it communicated to the society at large? This essay brings a new critical perspective to the current literature about this book, interrogating its reception at the level of mass culture, and studying the artists’ goals vis-à-vis the political and economic ferment of postwar reconstruction and the Cold War. 4 In Italian historiography, because of this book, Luzzara has become a legendary site, revisited twenty years later by photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin, and, more recently, by Stephen Shore.8 Historians Paolo Costantini and Elena Gualtieri have celebrated Strand’s crucial contribution to postwar photography, sifting through the dense correspondence between Strand and Zavattini and other significant friends, such as the Newhalls and Tosi.9 More recently, Antonella Russo has looked at book reviews at time of publication, revealing a great divide within the local photographic circles. On the American side, Un Paese was translated by Aperture in 1997; nonetheless, it still lacks critical study and recognition. Back in 1972, the retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1972 included the Italian portfolio, while Maren Stange’s critical anthology on Strand before and after his departure from the United States gave a marginal place to Un Paese, and Sarah Greenough’s retrospective on the occasion of Strand’s one hundredth birthday made a brief remark about the formal quality of those portraits, identified as ‘the heart of Strand’s statement.’10 5 My reading of this photobook draws inspiration from scholars in Italian cultural studies who have examined the shifting politics of this country during the 1950s and have noted a disconnect between the intentions of left-wing intellectuals promoting neorealist films, such as The Bicycle Thief, and the response of a mass audience prone to popular entertainment and modern consumer culture. As Stephen Gundle has explained, ‘the problem of communication, of the search for an appropriate language that would allow a real and fruitful exchange between intellectuals and workers, was one of pressing importance within the left.’11 Similar concerns apply to Un Paese, resulting from a cross- cultural dialogue between a neorealist writer and an American émigré sympathetic to Communism. Was this photobook a vehicle of communication with the common people it sought to represent, or was it rather a creative exercise, imbued with its authors’ idealism, but distant from the actual needs of the workers? The ‘Dynamic Realism’ of The Family 6 The montage of Un Paese resembles a film, with a sequence of eighty-eight photographs masterfully selected by Strand,12 and a text that features the unvarnished words of the villagers telling their stories. Zavattini writes the introduction in the first person, retracing the genesis of the book and his personal involvement. Two establishing shots of the River Po lead smoothly into Luzzara as, in the text, a local man describes the intimate experience of travelling across this landscape, watching a glowing sunset, and listening to roosters and chickens. The serene countryside, the objects of craft and labour, and the portraits of these people, fatigued and proud, convey a mystery that only their words can uncover. Strand’s camera renders these effigies a-temporal. The workers, farmers, and artisans, are symbols, rather than real persons. Études photographiques, 30 | 2012 Un Paese (1955) and the Challenge of Mass Culture 3 7 The Family, the group portrait on the cover, is a striking tableau that with the grace of its painterly composition connotes peaceful solidarity. Anthologized in many histories of photography as symbolic of ‘the dignity and nobility of simple people’ immersed in Italy’s rural traditions,13 this photograph has been praised by John Berger, a Marxist humanist, as emblematic of Strand’s moralizing and anticapitalist values. In particular, Berger drew a comparison between the force of this portrait and Louis Le Nain’s sober representations of lower classes: ‘Le Nain pointed out the simplicity and the moral superiority of peasant life to an elite fed on the rhetoric and the coarse opulence of the court art of Louis XIII. Paul Strand emphasizes the austerity and simplicity of lives lived today, to a public fed on advertisements and the hypocrisies of our affluence.’14 8 Strand achieved this balanced composition in progressive steps, focusing on the elderly mother sitting alone in front of her domestic threshold, and trying a few other arrangements and individual portraits. In a letter to Nancy Newhall, he identified The Family as his first large group portrait,15 a culmination of his social and formal concerns. 9 Earlier models for this picture can be traced to ‘sacred conversations,’ organized around a symmetrical axis with the Virgin Mary at the centre, or else to Caravaggio’s sensuous depictions, illustrating the barefoot figures of the have-nots. The art of Piero della Francesca, Strand’s favourite painter, is revealed by the vigorous presence of the sculptural bodies, bound to the land. Milton Brown, art historian friend who had accompanied Paul and his wife Hazel on an initial tour of Italian art in 1952, had remarked on the similarity between these two artists: ‘The serene grandeur, the peasant robustness transformed into patrician dignity, the real transmuted into the ideal, the ordinary in man and the transitory in nature converted into eternal symbols … like Piero, Strand has created an art which is still but not silent… which is complete, positive, and timeless.’16 10 This photograph can also be viewed as Strand’s homage to his American mentors, Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine, who had greatly influenced his social awareness as a photographer. One particular early portrait taken by Stieglitz in Venice in 1894 had caught Strand’s imagination, and during the Photo League years he had gone back to ‘the unforgettable photograph’ of ‘the Venetian boy, whose tattered clothes sharply emphasize[d] the fineness of the head, the deep eyes of the hurt child.’17 It is thus tempting to think that Stieglitz’s romanticized record of poverty inspired Strand’s Italian journey. ‘I dislike the superficial and the artificial, and I find less of it among the lower classes,’18 Stieglitz had stated in Venice; similarly, Strand sought to find a peasant world and reconstitute a preindustrial purity he could no longer grasp in his own country.