The exhibition focuses on the profound rapport between the arts and photography from the dawning, when photography was used as a model for painting, to its gradual affermation as an independent means of expression.
Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the invention and originality of photography in its own right, and the autonomy and aesthetic quality of photographic images came to be fully recognized. Also, the mechanical nature of the medium and its hyper-objectivity could now be interpreted as an individual choice made by the artist. By following the vicissitudes of Italian photography from 1850 to the present day, the exhibition focuses on the most significant moments from the point of view of art history and photographic history, pausing to examine artists and works selected from the National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Graphics Institute. The book contains a large number of illustrations, with the precise intention of providing visual proof of the intensity of exchange between different mediums of expression. In the introduction to the book, Marina Miraglia writes about the history of photography, Silvia Bordini describes the exchange between painting and the new medium, and Andrea Cortellessa describes the rapport between literature and the image. The exhibition focuses on the profound rapport between the arts and photography, from the dawning of the new technique, when photography was used both as a model and a tool for painting, and as a vector through which to spread knowledge of art, to its gradual affermation as an independent means of expression.