| Photos from the Backwaters | for everyone |
The latest Estorick Gallery show couldn’t be further from the rather garish reds and blacks of the Burri exhibition I wrote about a few months ago. It focuses on the photography of Giuseppe Cavalli (and to some extent on the work of other members of the groups of photographers he collaborated with in the 1940’s and 50’s).
Cavalli was not a trained artist. He started out (like so many members of the Italian middle classes) as a lawyer and only took to photograph in the mid 1930’s when was in his early thirties. He was a member of the “lucky” generation born just too late for service in the First World War but a shade too old for front line service in the Second- which may just possibly have affected his world view. Born in the deep south of Italy , he settled in Senigallia, a small town on the Adriatic between Rimini and Ancona
The aesthetics of Cavalli’s work are distinctly cool and disengaged. He steered well away from the overblown and emphatic styles favoured by the Fascist regime in the late 1930’s (the only visible evidence of the regime’s existence in the show is a picture of a member of the Balilla- the Party’s youth arm- photographed from the rear as he looks over a wall; again Cavalli’s date of birth meant that he would not himself have gone through the ranks of this organisation in a way that his younger contemporaries were obliged to do) but was also a long way removed from the equally and oppositely “engaged” Neo-Realist approach favoured by left-leaning artists in the immediate post war era (one of the pictures is titled “Strike”, but without that steer it wouldn’t be immediately obvious what was motivating the man whose arms are folded in a forceful manner but whose face has been left out of the shot). There is very little hint that Italy went through dictatorship, war, military occupation and civil war, followed by years of instability and then wrenching economic and social upheaval in these photos.
Instead the referents are mostly artistic. Some of the photos on show are still lives involving coffee pots and other bits of household equipment arranged in a manner reminiscent of the slightly obsessive repetition of form to be found in the paintings and graphic art of Giorgio Morandi. 
Others drift into pure abstraction. Others again, picking up the melancholy air of out-of-season seaside resorts, have overtones of de Chirico’s rather eerie frozen neo-classical townscapes. The general mood is distinctly enigmatic. The predominant tone of the photographs is rather pale and muted, quite unlike the almost garish black and white contrasts of the pictures by Petro Giacomelli included in the show. Deserted bathing huts stretch as far as the eye can see, bathers are reduced to mere dots on an apparently immense beach, struggling to be seen against a huge sky and seascape, fairground automatons stand still, waiting to be activated. 
Human activity is not entirely absent but is somehow suspended; a small port shivers in early morning mist waiting for activity to pick up on the quays (unless, of course, the dock workers have gone on strike….), elegant old fashioned wooden vessels sit outlined against the skyline waiting for their hulls to be completed (or maybe the striker is picketing the boat yard instead), other boats sit in an almost flat calm harbour, waiting for someone to come on board and take them away.
Others drift into pure abstraction. Others again, picking up the melancholy air of out-of-season seaside resorts, have overtones of de Chirico’s rather eerie frozen neo-classical townscapes. The general mood is distinctly enigmatic. The predominant tone of the photographs is rather pale and muted, quite unlike the almost garish black and white contrasts of the pictures by Petro Giacomelli included in the show. Deserted bathing huts stretch as far as the eye can see, bathers are reduced to mere dots on an apparently immense beach, struggling to be seen against a huge sky and seascape, fairground automatons stand still, waiting to be activated. Human activity is not entirely absent but is somehow suspended; a small port shivers in early morning mist waiting for activity to pick up on the quays (unless, of course, the dock workers have gone on strike….), elegant old fashioned wooden vessels sit outlined against the skyline waiting for their hulls to be completed (or maybe the striker is picketing the boat yard instead), other boats sit in an almost flat calm harbour, waiting for someone to come on board and take them away.
Cavalli’s approach to photographing people is especially intriguing. It wasn’t that he was incapable of photographing human beings- he did some charming portraits of children (probably family members) and there’s a lovely shot of a group of nuns, whose expressions range from prim disapproval to open enjoyment in the show. For some reason, however, he seems to have preferred not to show faces. His people are either too far away to be recognisable as individuals, shot without faces (a style of photography not unknown among t-girls, of course….) or- perhaps the preferred option- shot from behind, like the photo of the priest striding into the distance which tops this piece. It’s a slightly alienating approach but also one which invites speculation and story telling. Where is the priest going and why? There’s a hint of menace in the air- the weather looks about to turn stormy. An Italian reference broadly contemporary with the photograph which springs to mind prompts one to read this as a depiction of Don Camillo off for another round of hostilities with Peppone in Guareschi’s little valley of the Po, though I very much doubt if Cavalli had that in mind when he took the shot. Beyond Guareschi’s ultimately rather cosy account of Catholic/Communist confrontations in the immediate post war era, it may still relate obliquely to the tensions of that period, when a deeply contested referendum on abolishing the monarchy was followed by bitter divisions between the Reds and the Blacks, Communists and Catholics, which brought Italy back to the brink of civil war in the run up to the 1948 elections. Or perhaps the priest is just in a hurry to get home for his dinner after a hard day visiting parishioners…..
One can play similar games with many of Cavalli’s photographs and there’s obviously a danger of reading far more into them than is really there. Other than the aesthetic and formal pleasures which clearly mattered so much to Cavalli himself, the strongest sentiment which emerges from so many of them is that the really important things are happening somewhere else- just over the horizon, on the other side of the wall, just out of shot or at another time of the day when the photographer will not be around to record them. Perhaps that reflects how the world felt in Senigallia; not particularly important, historic without being loaded with monuments to a glorious past like some if its neighbours, neither truly industrial nor really rural, poised between north and south, a place where great events are always likely to happen somewhere else. It’s certainly an evocative and intriguing show.
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