Nino Migliori

Abstract

When Nino Migliori (born in Bologna 1926, where he still lives and works) began his career in photography, ideas about visual art in Italy were divided into two main camps. From the end of the Second World War up to 1948, when Migliori's first photographs were produced, a bitter debate continued between those who championed the mirroring function of art and those who were more interested in the exploration of expression, which was made possible by the avant-garde movements. This ideological battle, which pitted groups of artists such as II Fronte Nuovo delle Arti against the II Milione group, the MAC group, and the Corrente group among others,1 was very complex, and involved themes ranging from ideological commitment to purely aesthetic questions. However, we can not reduce these arguments to the mere opposition between realism and abstraction, or between political commitment and fomulism. Nevertheless, the artists themselves were placed in these categories, and the divisions between them have characterized the evaluation of photographic, literary, and film production as well as painting since that time. Immediately after the war, photography in Italy was also burdened by a cultural environment that was deeply influenced by Benedetto Croce's idealism, which maintained that a sharp Jivisiun existed between ‘poetry’ and ‘non-poetry’.2