Italian Style- the Photographer’s View

The latest Estorick Gallery show returns to the exploration of Italian photography by looking at the work which Giogio Casali did for the architecture and design magazine “Domus” from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

Casali was responsible for a very large number of the magazine’s covers in this period as well as providing the pictures for stories about prestige architecture projects and new products in the home furnishing and fittings line.  Indeed he seems to have been the “go to” man when Gio Ponti, the founding editor of the journal as well as a notable architect and designer in his own right, wanted a striking cover during these decades.  These were the years of the Italian economic miracle, when the country went from being a basically rural society with patches of industrialisation round Milan and Turin to becoming a modern developed economy.   Millions of people from the deep south streamed north to work on the Fiat assembly lines or in other factories at the other end of the country (rather than emigrating to the USA, Argentina or France as their grandparents might have done).   Towns and cities across the north sprouted new suburbs, with blocks of flats rushed up to accommodate the incomers.   Even Italian football was affected; the new arrivals in Turin took to supporting Juventus (for years a backwater club favoured by the Torinese middle classes) because the long-established local working class, which rarely viewed the newcomers with a friendly eye, supported Torino.  It was a massive social upheaval.

And you wouldn’t have seen much evidence of it on the pages on “Domus”, at least not directly.   Even though Ponti did design a few (probably rather upmarket) housing developments they don’t feature on the covers Casali helped to create.  The journal was aimed very much at a professional, art-school trained, audience with a certain sale among those social groups who saw themselves as the leaders of fashion and style.       Its world view was resolutely modernist- Frank Lloyd Wright- influenced villas in the middle of the Tuscan countryside, new office buildings on the edge of historic city centres or skyscrapers like the Pirelli Tower in Milan, interior design with strong Bauhaus echoes and so on.    The tone was set by movements like Pop and Op Art. Most of the items depicted on its pages would have been far too expensive for the average immigrant from Calabria struggling to make ends meet in the suburbs of Milan- and would probably have looked bizarre and alienating to someone from that background.  It probably didn’t have that much sale to members of the Milanese working class either.   The wider popularisation of this modernist style would come perhaps a decade later than Casali’s photos.

This rather rarefied social context doesn’t stop Casali’s work from being something of a nostalgia trip for those of us of a certain age.   It’s a remainder of a world where plastic and formica were the last word in modern design and glass and reinforced concrete the marks of up-to-the minute architecture.   I suppose the Sixties are far enough away (and culturally prestigious enough) for not all of it to look hopelessly antiquated and outdated even some fifty years on.   I have a feeling that some of my lovely friends would love to have a try out of the outfit the young lady below is wearing, for instance…..

The Estorick show includes a few of the more iconic items depicted in Casali’s photographs.   Some, like the “Superleggera” chair whose virtues are being illustrated (probably by Casali’s wife) at the top of the page, cleave to a functionalist aesthetic.  Others are a bit idiosyncratic.   Take the “book chair” illustrated below.   People at the opening night of the show spent much time debating how they thought one was supposed to sit on it.  The majority view was that the model had it wrong and that the “natural” way to engage with the seat was to turn the leaves over until you arrived at a comfortable angle and sit with your back against the upright surface this created.  Sadly we weren’t allowed to try it out either way. 

 Either way, they convey a sense of style- and articulate the image of an Italy which was both very much at the forefront of design with qualities which stood comparison with the great achievements of the national past (as suggested in the juxtaposition of Brunelleschi’s Dome on Florence Cathedral with modern design items in the shot below) and thoroughly integrated in the cutting edge international design culture of the day as defined in New York or London or Paris.   In the divided political and social cultures of Cold War Italy, “Domus” was clearly on the Christian Democrat side, even if the stricter brand of Catholic might have been uncomfortable with the hints of elite decadence some images suggested. 

This implicit alignment perhaps explains the at first sight surprising number of pictures of new churches which found their way into the pages of “Domus”.   Obviously the massive population shifts created an urgent requirement for churches in the new suburbs.   Even in the south new churches were required- Ponti’s striking co-cathedral below was built in the southern port of Taranto to supplement a medieval building which had become inadequate for the needs of a population vastly expanded by the establishment of massive steel and chemical works (which made Taranto one of the most polluted cities in Italy…).    

Even as church attendance began to drop off in Italy (and I wonder how many readers of “Domus” were devout church goers) church commissions provided a steady flow of income for architects and designers.   At times the results have a slightly dream like quality.  Take the design illustrated below (Casali had a reputation for being able to photograph design models in ways which made them look “real”- but he had his work cut out on this one).  This looks a bit like a spaceport from a Dan Dare strip (giving my age away there…).  It’s actually a design for a church which was supposed to be built beside the Sea of Galilee.  It dates from the mid 1960’s in the euphoria following Pope Paul VI’s visit to the Holy Land; unsurprisingly the project appears to have fallen victim to the politics of the Middle East though I wonder how “buildable” it actually was even if war hadn’t intervened.  

Estorick regulars recalling a show a few years back on Italian design in the 1930’s might have wondered whether “Domus” wasn’t guilty of a little selective amnesia over its own past by the time Casali started collaborating with the magazine.  “Domus” was not a new title in the 1950’s.  Ponti founded it in 1928, fell out with the team running it in 1941 and regained control in 1948.   In other words, it appeared regularly right through the high years of the Fascist regime.   The famous “Superleggera” chair, with its use of non-traditional materials, looks remarkably like a belated child of that regime’s “Autarchy” drive which I’ve written about before (and the web site dedicated to preserving the memory of Gio Ponti’s life and work implicitly locates a lot of  his design work, including the “Superleggera” in that period, not post-war).   Indeed there were distinct family resemblances between quite a few of the ultra-modernist high tech consumer items made out of new plastics in the 1930’s and goods being produced, also out of plastics and other “artificial” materials, which were highlighted on the pages of “Domus” from the 1950’s.   The quality and durability of the plastic was obviously a lot higher second time round and the products probably worked a lot better but in design terms the linkages were there.  

Obviously the Estorick show wasn’t to blame for Ponti and “Domus” being a bit economic with the truth about what they’d been doing in the Ventennio.   It was however a little disappointing in another way.  Despite Casali’s obvious skills with the camera, he remained a rather shadowy figure as an individual.    Clearly he didn’t start taking photos in the 1950’s.   He was born in 1913, evidently lost both parents at an early age and started working as an errand boy for a photographer in his early teens, picking up his camera skills as an apprentice there.   He set up his own studio in Milan in 1938.   The show includes a tiny number of photos which predate his “Domus” collaboration and reveal a different side to his art- a couple of slightly brooding landscapes daring from the war years but with no indication of what he as doing then (he would have been well within call up age in 1940).  

 It also includes some of what amount to his holiday snaps from trips to Spain and the Italian south (unlike some professional photographers Casali clearly enjoyed taking his camera on holiday and snapping what he saw around him- and his holidays intriguingly seem to have been spent in places where the “Domus” aesthetic was hardly known).  These are several cuts above the normal holiday album fodder and again are rather different from his “professional” work, full of people going about their work and play in rather down at heel surroundings.   In all honesty I found them more attractive than the skilful but sometimes slightly superficial work he did for a living and I’d have liked to know rather more about the man behind the camera than we’re given in this show.