Alessandro Pavia’s Album dei Mille: Collection, Archive, and National Identity during the Risorgimento

Abstract

Histories of the carte de visite and the photographic album rarely consider adequately the intersections between modes of viewership associated with collecting and archiving, and assertions of national identity in the nineteenth century. Alessandro Pavia’s Album dei Mille, completed in 1867 to commemorate the Expedition of the Thousand, a defining episode in the Italian Risorgimento, presents the portrait card of 824 of the 1,092 men known to have participated. The photographs are ordered alphabetically and erratically sourced – although Pavia took many in his own studio – and bound into a massive album. The Album mobilises practices of viewing and organisation that come from both the archive and the collection, constituting a case in which contradictory modes of constructing narrative, engaging historical time, and understanding the materiality of photography produce a complex mode of viewership significant to the histories of photography and identity construction in the newly formed Italian nation. Seen from the purviews of the collection and the archive, this episode in the history of photography has implications for understanding how the album and the portrait card shaped the way photographs were viewed and used in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more specifically in nation-building movements such as the Italian Risorgimento.