1960s-2016: ACROSS ITALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY.On the in-between landscape, art, architecture and archetypes, and around the exhibition Viaggio in Italia

Abstract I am interested in investigating how photography has become a tool for investigation and speculation more than representation, how it can enable a material perception and understanding of history and social environments and how narrative discourses in photography build on archetypes, mythology (and on the activity of mythologizing connected to the symbolic forms of expression), iconography in visual arts, on references within history of photography and on architecture and urbanism.In order to explore these issues I am going to investigate Italian photography in relation to the international art scene, and to look for connecting points, mutual references/heritages and differences –especially but not exclusively–with American photography (Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, John Gossage, Joe Deal, Alec Soth, Ron Jude, Peter Brown, David Pollock –Canada–) and with the Düsseldorf School of Photography.I am interested in looking at the shift occurred in photography between the 60s, when it was strongly tied and influenced by conceptual art and arte povera (for example Ugo Mulas, Franco Vaccari), and the 70s, when it started to reflect on the transformation of the urban and non-urban landscape. I am therefore going to research the socio-political, economical and geographical reasons why it was not exported internationally in a period when the Italian art market was riding the wave of arte povera's success. It remained a local, not well know phenomenon mostly (if) connected to clients such as municipalities and regional institutions.In these years of reconstruction when districts of office blocks, factories, social housing were arising in a newly growing urban sprawl, a new attention towards the landscape was given by architects, urbanists and theoreticians such as Bernardo Secchi, Bruno Zevi and Italo Zannier. Having a background in Architecture, photographers such as Guido Guidi and Gabriele Basilico (just to name a few) started to investigate the territory, measure it and relate to it through the camera.In 1984 the exhibition “Viaggio in Italia” organized by Luigi Ghirri with Gianni Leone and Enzo Velati marked a watershed in the history of Italian photography. The work of the photographers invited to participate in the exhibition in 1984 became and still is paradigmatic of a blend between the use of photography as intellectual tool and a sort of “landscape” photography, which on one hand embraces the contemporary experiences outside Italy and on the other builds on history. It is therefore crucial to observe in these terms the intersection between the notion of memory and the perception of the landscape understood as both individual and collective space.Interestingly enough, after this exhibition, photography placed at the crossroads of reportage, documentary, and art photography filled an interstitial gap, then expanded and solidified: one of the reasons why it still drives–after 30 years–a certain way of seeing, which rules as if it were a school. In fact there was no school, but instead a dispersed similar need and attitude which were then spread by the actual academies of photography. An urgency brought up by historical, social, architectural and material changes of the landscape.Melissa Destino (1984, Bari) currently works at Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna. With a background in visual arts and curating, as well as the design and photography of cultural heritage, she has worked in various contemporary art galleries and has assisted curator Elena Filipovic on several publishing projects, including The Artist as Curator. She has worked as production manager of Marinella Senatore’s “The School of Narrative Dance,” in Brussels. She recently curated The Provisional City at Spazio Murat, Bari.