Percorrer um País: perceção e memória coletiva do território na fotografia

Abstract

This study focuses on the role of photography in the context of Italian territory, comprehended in the last decades in a very broad and comprehensive manner. The Italian territory has undergone many changes during the years of economic boom, these changes did not affect the consolidated city and its historical center in most of the cases, but rather the peripheries and the entire landscape that had continued to remain esthetically until then. In particular, it examined the development of a "movement" which brought together numerous Italian photographers of the post- Second World War, from the 1980s particularly, called "Italian Scuola di paesaggio". While being a non-formalized group, the implications and the impacts that the work of this specific set of photographers introduced, had influenced not only the history of Italian photography but also the perception and use of the photographic image as an apparatus for the reading of the contemporary city, which was often considered confused and contradictory. These photographers were, in fact, the first ones to pioneer the visual representation of the space that would make a part of our collective memory; and to give it form and coherence through photography. Through the critical analysis of the images of three photographers who worked with different approaches and methods, an assembly of materials are presented at reader's disposal, not only theoretical but also visual. Driven by the desire of providing to the reader a basis of what is represented in the study, the research work is accompanied with exemplary images chosen. The focus of the final work is therefore not limited to photography per se, but it extends itself to the forms and problems of urban space since photography can answer to these issues as being a tool of critical reflection, capable of mediating adequate solutions to inhabit the contemporary territory.