World photography highlights #2 Italy

Italy has been through many changes over the years, artists and journalists tend to focus on raising social awareness of the times and situations.

Photography played a huge part in capturing those important times (WWII and the many political changes), with the rapid transformations in society during the economic boom. 

Photographers also captured the culture and values that are still found in today’s Italy.

So after this very brief introduction I will now show a selection of Photographers that i hope you find as interesting as I do.

Letizia Battaglia b1935

Battaglia is a Sicilian photographer and photojournalist. Her work shows a wide variety of Sicilian life but she is best known for her work featuring the Mafia. Battaglia took up photography in 1971 and worked for the left-wing paper, L’Ora in Palermo until the paper was eventually closed down in 1990. During her time with the newspaper she documented the vicious internal war of the Mafia, and its effect on civil society. With well over 600,000 photographs taken whilst working for the newspaper, she would often find herself at the scenes of murders (sometimes four or five in a day).

 Working with Franco Zecchin they produced a lot of the now iconic photographs that have come to represent the Sicilian Mafia and the Sicilian lifestyle. 

 Battaglia as been awarded  one of the most prestigious prizes in Germany,  the Erich Salomon Preis as well as Lifetime Achievement from the Mother Jones International fund for Documentary Photography and given the Cornell Capa Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography.

Giuseppe Incorpora (1834-1914)

Giuseppe was an important Italian Photographer of the 19^th century. Unfortunately a don’t know a great deal about him but his photographs say it all. I really love the fact that looking at his work is like looking through a time portal into to 19^th century. He took many landscape photos and is known for his portraits of such people as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Donna Franca Florio and King Edward VII. 

Dido Fontana b1971

Dido grew up surrounded by his father’s photography and other artworks and found himself creating artwork using various media. 

He is not at first glance what the general idea of what a photographer “should” look like, with large physique from his weightlifting.

 His imagery has a very raw, sexual feel to it, with a fashion and anti-fashion edge to the photography. His work to for me is very pure and I feel it is very direct.

 Dido uses film and Polaroid cameras to produces his almost voyeuristic analogue images. His style has been known to be described as “a bit scarred, and a bit anti-establishment”.

 Dido has exhibited in galleries worldwide and collaborated with countless magazines.  In 2007 he won best photo at the Pitti Immagine Award in Florence.

Ferruccio Ferroni (1920-2007)

Ferruccio graduated in law in 1953 and was a practicing lawyer until 1992. He took up photography in 1948 under the tuition of GuiseppeCavalli. During his service in WWII he attended the school for officers and was transferred to Greece as a Lieutenant. During the war he was captured and taken to a concentration camp for two years until his release in 1946,after he was released he was admitted to a sanatorium in Forli and he remained there for a further two years.

 It was there that he became friends with a chemist who was an expert in the use of cameras, in both development and printing and this chemist friend helped him to process to films that he had taken during his time in the war that he could not develop due to the difficult times and situations.

In 1950 he was awarded the “Grand Concours International de Photographie” for his work during his time in the war. You can find his work in the Museum Folkwang, in the collection named Subjective Pictures of Essen. In 1996 he was awarded the title of “Master Italian Photographer” by FIAF and “Author of the year” again by FIAF in 2006.

Written by Paul Casey Hemming 

@ Big World Picture Dot Com