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The time of
Il Mondo
All those civil battles undertaken in the Pannunzio's review, were fondamental for the political maturation of the new class of politicians and intellectuals of the second postwar period. And more over it had a great role in the struggle against great monopoly, every kind of totalitarisme, in favor of the process of moral and civil development under the sign of Benedetto Croce's philosophical idealism. |
Carlo
Dalla Mura|
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Carlo
Dalla Mura
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Il Mondo and the photography
In spite of its political, economical and literary finalities
as a review, "Il Mondo" had also a great influence in the italian photographic
culture. "The pictures on Il Mondo!. - as recently has affirmed
a contributor of the Pannunzio's review, Beniamino Placido - We use to
‘reed’ them in the review, where they took sense from the texts that surrounded
them. Pannunzio (...) before composing the page, used to study firmally
which was the best way to combine texts and images. He had been a
painter, a cinematographic critic. He had a great talent for the images.(...)
and he knew what to do to give them more expressiveness. The painting is
a poetry waiting for words. Like the photography is. Theese pictures enlightened
by the words around them (...) represented our weekly lesson of attention.
Sometimes they were shot by professional photographers, sometimes by amateurs.
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Carlo Dalla Mura, a reluctant photographer
Lawyer by profession and traveller for pleasure,
Dalla Mura (Udine, 1927) during one of his stay in Paris he sent some pictures
to the editorial staff of "Il Mondo", whose he was a keen reader. Two of
theese photose were purchase and immediatly published, starting so a collaboration
that would have lasted throughout the following 8 years, from the spring
of 1958, until the last issue in march 1966, when Pannunzio announced the
closure of the review. Together with the end of "Il Mondo", even Dalla
Mura's the photographic carreer stopped: he had always considerate
himself not a professional photographer, but only an amateur, and for this
reason he never joined up the entourage of the Gruppo Friulano
per una Nuova Fotografia (Friulan Group for a New Photography) developped
in the Friuli region between the end of the 40s and during the 50s, around
the group of photographers like Italo Zannier, Carlo Bevilacqua, Gianni
e Giuliano Borghesan, Aldo Beltrame, and the venetians Fulvio Roiter e
Toni Del Tin. So not bound to any photographic circle or organized group,
that in those years were the main vehicles for diffusion for any kind of
photographic experience, Dalla Mura had not the acknowledgement he certainly
deserved. His reluctance to consider himself a real photographer was the
main cause of a complete oblivion of his artistic figure, even in his native
land.
An oblivion certainly determined by
the cultural climate of those years, when the critics recognized the value
of photography assimilating it as a traditional kind of art, divided in
low and high production with all the aesthetic categories of a critical
method that today seems out of date. Dalla Mura's pictures couldn't find
a collocation in the photographic culture of that period. His adhesion
to the image values was just temporary, stricly connected to the cultural
project that he shared with "Il Mondo". So, when the review closed he lost
all the basic motivations and interest in his photographic career, that
he never felt and lived as aeethetic research, or as a civil mission, but
rather as a vital, emotional experience, as a quick annotation of a
tranche de vie, respectful of Cartier Bresson's lesson. This approach
gave his pictures a "levity" that was misanderstood by the contemporaries
so involved in legitimated photography in the simple dialectic between
form and content.
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|Carlo
Dalla Mura|
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Carlo Dalla Mura
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But thanks to the lightness, freshness of
Dalla Mura's taste, his pictures can transmit the spirit of the times,
as an impressionist "contrappunto" of the neorealistic icons, like
the pictures of Patellani, Secchiaroli, Pinna, Sellerio...
Dalla Mura, and other amateurs, reluctant photographers, they well represented the Pannunzio's approach to the images, his idea considering photos as "opened work", not as a rigid visual comment to the text, but rather something to be filled or "enlightened by the words" .. Far from the dogmathic thesis of neorealistic culture, Dalla Mura went down among the people, in the streets, in the cafè, in the museums.. as a tourist among the tourists all around Europe, taking note in his "visual notebook", the fading impressions frozen in an "instant dècisif ". He was not a reporter, interested in the representation of the facts, or the extraordinaries social events.. he was rather an acute observer, curios, about the simple nature of the province life portraited with the same glance used for the great european capitals. Among the group of his native region photographers of his generation,(Bevilacqua, Gianni e Giuliano Borghesan, Zannier, Ciol), made famous tanks to the work of divulgation undertaken by Italo Zannier, "official historian" of italian photography - Dalla Mura seems the only one provided with a real cosmopolitan approach, not only considering the large space given to him in the pages of "Il Mondo", the most important italian cultural magazine of its period, but above all for his sensibility, his particular glance, not restricted by the local dimension of his native land, the Arcadia of popular traditions, or in a "poetic realism" linked to the rituals of the farmer society, but, on the contrary, capable of liberating itself, above all in the floating travelling dimension, through fragments of vivid reality, emotional traces fondend by chance. |
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The exhibition's path
The photographic exhibition Carlo
Dalla Mura, "Il Mondo" di un fotografo friulano is constituited
by two sections.
The first section - Photographs for"Il
Mondo" - shows a large selection of the pictures published in the
Pannunzio's review; the second - Photographs 1956 - 1965
- shows pictures, for the most part not published, which illustrate
the complete photographic experience of their author.
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