The Photo-Text in the Mussolini Era

Abstract

In the 1930s, Fascism’s Mythopoeia found in propaganda photobooks a comfortable space in which to configure itself. The layout of the photobooks draws on the experiments carried out by the editors of “Campo Grafico” [1933 - 1939] and by eclectic personalities like Guido Modiano; with reference to photography, on the other hand, from the modernist style developed by the amateurs of photographic circles reworking the experience gained by the European avant-gardes since the previous decade. All these innovations led to a rethinking of the usual relationship between image and text, gaining a new and a much more dynamic interaction between visual and textual. Through the analysis of some of the most important photobooks of the Fascist Era, the following article aims to show some aspects of the verbal and visual rhetoric which the Fascist regime used to generate an articulated model of the world in which to believe, even if its appearance differed radically from what one saw with one's own eyes or experienced on one's own skin every day. In propaganda photo books, the facts are emphasized, even judged, in order to construct a specious argument that leaves no room for doubt.