Giuseppe Cavalli

Photography
as an artistic means
Anita
Margiotta
Giuseppe Cavalli was active as a photographer for more than twenty-five years: from the mid-Thirties, when he
bought his first Leica, to his sudden premature death in 1961. These were crucial years in Italian history and art,
spanning the tragic period preceding the outbreak of the Second World War and the difficult postwar reconstruction
period, and ending at the threshold of the legendary 1960s and the economic boom that marked Italy’s definitive
exit from the world of agricultural economies and launched it among the world powers. Economic and energy
crises were still a long way off, and it was a period in which poverty and moral and material problems alternated with
hope and faith in the future.
Thus, Cavalli embarked on his photographic career at the height of the Fascist period, when all photographic
production hinged on the debate concerning the relationship between artistic photography and reportage, that is
between formalists and realists – a highly relevant issue at the time – although, on closer examination, the dividing
line between the two genres was not always that clear-cut.
At a time when new topics were being discussed in the field of art and photography in the United States,
Germany and the Soviet Union, the advent of Fascism in Italy slowed down the autonomous development of
visual language, sundering the relationship between photography and culture, between art and photography.
Although many individuals engaged in isolated experiments, it was not until after the war that photographers and
intellectuals re-established close contact. Moreover, during that period the relationship between intellectuals and the
Italian political world was very strained, if not actually nonexistent. Only a few lone voices continued, where possible,
to speak out individually, thus keeping alive the cultural humus that would form the foundations for renewed
artistic experiences in better times.
Yet Fascism understood that photography was an important tool of communication and persuasion, equal to
radio and cinema. That is why the regime favoured certain aspects of reportage and photojournalism while seeking
to purge them of any critical content. During the long Fascist years, until the Second World War in fact, they were
used for ideological and political ends, and it was not until the end of the war that long-repressed social issues
emerged and were treated by Neorealism.
The only public commission that Giuseppe Cavalli accepted, came from the Director General for Antiquities and
Fine Arts, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, who through the Florence Superintendency, assigned to him the task of
reproducing the panels of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise for the Baptistery. This is indicative of photography’s
role in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century, when it was not an art but purely a means of documentation,
but one that imposed a well-defined vision inherent in its language.
Although Cavalli always drew his inspiration from places that were familiar and dear to him or from the social
context in which he lived, his artistic production went beyond the private sphere to achieve a broader, more extensive
reach.
He had much contact with both live and abstract contemporary European and American photographic experiences,
which a cultured and informed man like himself was certainly well up on. This characteristic of his has been
widely acknowledged; in fact, he was among the artists chosen as best representing Italy’s development during the
postwar period for the exhibition entitled Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968 held at the Guggenheim, New York, in
1995.
As well as the relationship between Cavalli’s artistic themes and contemporary national and foreign experiences,
it should be mentioned that a strong sense of local and family traditions led him to exalt poetic and literary values
with a strong humanist slant in his work. These pervade the subjects he represents, since as he himself said: “great
artists are not at all concerned with expressing the feeling of the subject, but rather their own feeling.”
Cavalli believed that photography had to break from the preconception of its merely being an imitation of reality,
and once again become the sister of painting – as it was conceived by Daguerre when it was invented in 1839 –
which is how many nineteenth-century photographers saw it. He stated in the Manifesto of the photographic group
La Bussola, composed of Vincenzo Balocchi, Mario Finazzi, Ferruccio Leiss, Federico Vender, Luigi Veronesi and
Cavalli himself and founded in 1947, that their aim was to make photography an art, that it was possible to be an
artist with a camera in the same way that one could be an artist with a brush, a sculptor with a chisel, or a poet with
a pen. Like all artists, in fact, the photographer sees things that others do not see, or look at inattentively; the sub-
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