Born in Udine in 1896, Modotti emigrated to San Francisco in 1913 and became Mexico’s photographer of workers’ hands and Communist Party imagery before her 1930 expulsion and 1942 death in Mexico City.
Photography
Italian photographers and the photographic record of the country.
Luigi Ghirri and the invention of a new Italian landscape
A former surveyor from Modena, Ghirri photographed signs, postcards and reproductions in Kodachrome (1978) before shaping Viaggio in Italia, the 1984 project that redefined Italian landscape photography.
Letizia Battaglia and Palermo’s archive of blood
Starting in journalism at forty, Battaglia (1935-2022) photographed Mafia murders for L’Ora, supplied evidence used against Giulio Andreotti, and opened Palermo’s International Centre of Photography in 2017.
Gianni Berengo Gardin and the fight over Venice’s cruise ships
Over seven decades Berengo Gardin (1930-2025) documented Venice, Italian factories and psychiatric hospitals in Morire di classe (1969), before campaigning against giant cruise ships in the Giudecca canal.
The Florence brothers who photographed a nation into being
Founded in 1852, Fratelli Alinari built a 5.5-million-image archive of Italian art and architecture that shaped art history teaching abroad, and passed into public ownership under Regione Toscana in 2019-2020.