Interdisciplinary Postmodernism: Re-thinking the Sixties by Martina Caruso (Courtauld)

Fotografia circa 1968

I focus on the chiasmus that occurred between art, and photography in particular, around 1968 in Italy. By then artists had begun to creatively use photographic documents, rendering the medium an accepted art form. Photographers, conversely, started to experiment with the conceptual and self-reflexive potential of the medium beyond its perceived documentary straightjacket.

1968 represents a recognised locus for political and social fermentation and unrest as well as a heightened moment for neo-Dada and conceptual art experimentation. It was a time when photographers began to mix socially and professionally with artists. Nevertheless these ‘categories’ (art and photography) still tend to be examined separately in an art history subsumed by the arte povera movement promoted by Germano Celant.

At the time, Benedetto Croce’s 1902 idea that “photography is not quite art” still prevailed. Even current research that tries to draw links between art and photography maintains an inevitable separation that does not allow for the thematic and political cross-cuttings that began to occur between both practices in the late 1960s.

My investigation is the first to develop conceptual connections between the work of photographers and artists. Photographers like Mario Cresci, Ugo Mulas and Franco Vaccari began their careers in the 1950s and early 1960s making socially-engaged humanist documentary photographs. Their neorealist imagery shows a post-war Italy of folklore, behaviour and habits that were rapidly disappearing. In the late 1960s they began to look towards the world of art and experiment with installation, abstraction and seriality, influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s ultimate refusal to create. Around the same time, following the use of photographic imagery in pop art, conceptual artists like Alighiero Boetti, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Emilio Prini began to use photography to play with ideas of perception.

Cresci, Mulas and Vaccari’s early photographs reveal a very distant world, while their later photographs can now be seen to occupy the realm of conceptual art. While a perceived divide that still exists between ‘artists’ and ‘photographers’, this presentation focuses on the social, conceptual and political ways in which their work is connected.