Photography

A photo collage of overlapping impressions by Piero Boccardi decorates the catalog of the “Mostra sperimentale di fotografia futurista” (1931). Some of the 166 exhibited works had already been shown at the “1° Concorso Fotografico Nazionale di Roma” in 1930, on the occasion of which Marinetti and Tato penned the manifesto “La fotografia futurista”. The futurists experimented in various areas of photography. In the photo “Il perfetto borghese”, Tato played with the deliberate disguise of objects, in which their composition with precisely-studied lighting and shadow effects suggests a non-existent reality. Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia’s experiments with photographic dynamism are among the most famous works of futurist photography. They were strongly influenced by the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. While these two recorded sequential movement in individual photographs, the Bragaglia brothers were interested in the synthesis of a movement in a single picture. Successful examples of this include “Il miope” and “Fumatore” (1913). In 1932, the “Mostra nazionale fotografia futurista”, organised by Bruno G. Sanzin, also showed recent works by several artists. The cover was designed in two colours, the three cut-out circles in different sizes reveal the following white page. With ten presented works, the advertised ceramics occupied a rather small space.