Futurism and Photography

Rating:
Summary: Extremely Stimulating and Worth Purchasing, But Not Flawless
Review: I have probably read over a hundred books on artistic photography, and this is the most inspiring in terms of my personal development as a photographer. Still, it has some imperfections. Here are the pluses and minuses.

Pluses: First, the book (which accompanied a 2001 exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London) packs a lot of good information. The core chapters include "The Image of Self," "Photodynamism," "Photo-Performance," "The Twenties," and "The Thirties." Toward the end of the book are biographies and a bibliography. The extensive coverage of Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Arturo Bragaglia was appropriate since the brothers were important in the history of photography. I had never heard of Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), but he was clearly a major talent.

Second, the book is striking in design. The black-and-white photographs from 1909-1939 are beautifully reproduced. Each chapter begins with jumbled typography (even more radical than the cover) that matches the overall modernity of Futurists. Even the front and back covers and flaps of this signature-bound book are stylish.

Minuses: First, although the author is well known as an expert on Futurism, his text is abstruse. Consider this sentence on page 10: "By translating the infrasensorial and metaperceptive dimensions for the first time... photography seemed to penetrate the very mystery of life." I am not certain if the problem is the original text or the translation from the Italian.

Second, I felt there was too much emphasis on Fortunato Depero. He was certainly an important Futurist figure, and his self-portraits seem to be precursors of works by photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee. Nevertheless, I do not feel that the inclusion of 14 photographs/details by him (including self-portraits) and 18 other photographs OF him was a good use of space. I would have liked to see more works by artists such as Maggiorino Gramaglia, Edmund Kesting, and Wanda Wulz, whose photos are more visually intriguing than Depero's.

Finally, although the author puts the Futurist photographers in the broader context of Italian Futurists such as Marinetti and Azari, the book would have been stronger if he had compared in more detail Futurist photographers with contemporaries such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, John Heartfield, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Alexander Rodchenko. Another set of comparisons could have involved "avant-garde" photographers who came before and after the Futurists. Perhaps a couple pages of text and images could have been devoted to the relationships of non-Futurist and Futurist photographers.

All things taken into consideration, I have put this book in a prominent place in my library and will be referring to it frequently. Buy it from Amazon.com!