news | Alinari Playlist
The "Playlist Alinari" audio series is now online on our social channels. This series about the Alinari Archives is a project realised in collaboration with Radio Papesse.
With the #PlaylistAlinari audio series, the archive tells its story through the images chosen by the people who work there. A collection of short audios to be discovered online: a one-minute audio for each photograph.
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Sixth Episode
"Springtime" by W. Robinson, 1890 ca.
"In the late XIX century photography is still the object of a lively debate: is it art or not? Many intellectuals state that it’s just a representation of reality. In response, the current of Pictorialism claims its full artistic dignity. Two exponents of Pictorialism are Henry Peach Robinson and his son, Ralph, the author of this photo titled "Springtime". The picture dates back to 1890 circa: a couple of farmers heading back home along a country road, dominated by a big windmill. As they walk, they are hugging tenderly …it looks like the final scene of a film… Its sharpness is impressive: the photograph isn’t just a shot but a complex composition, obtained in the printing stage by combining figures and backgrounds from different negatives and then retouching them with paint and brushes. This was Henry Peach Robinson’s theory, first illustrated in his ‘Pictorial effects in photography’ in 1869."
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Fifth Episode
"Himalaya" by Vittorio Sella, 1909
"Vittorio Sella inherited the passion for mountains from his uncle Quintino, Minister of the Kingdom of Italy as well as founder of Club Alpino Italiano; the passion for photography came instead from his father Giuseppe Venanzio, a researcher in chemistry and the author of “Plico del Fotografo”, a manual on the practical and theoretical art of photography. Vittorio Sella is the mountain photograph par excellence, whom Ansel Adams devoted a memorable essay to. And it’s wonderful to get lost along the lines of this imposing and superb natural monument, Mount Siniolchu with its 6888 mt. height. Vittorio is fifty when he takes this picture, he is on Karakorum, heading for K2, with Luigi Amedeo di Savoia with whom he already shared some memorable expeditions to Alaska and on Ruwenzori in Africa. Sella’s pictures document an heroic period in mountaineering and are a testimony of a world that is disappearing. Would Vittorio ever guess that nowadays his photos are used to measure the melting of glaciers and the damages caused by climate change onto these fragile and sublime landscapes?"
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Fouth Epidose
"The employees of the Fratelli Alinari photographic Factory in Florence", by Fratelli Alinari, 1899
"As if they didn’t know the rules of the game, look at them, none is looking into the camera… And yet they are all the employees at Alinari’s: 36 in total, including operators, printers, archivists, clerks and accountants. The company is run by Vittorio, Alinari’s second generation: he’s the one who takes the leap into industrial production, he’s the one who understands there’s an important market for artistic pictures and sends teams of operators around the country to take photographs for publishing. In 1899, when this portrait was made, the company owned no less than 25 thousand plates of Italian artworks and had the capacity of printing thousands of photographs a day. “ This image - we are told by the now all-female staff of the Alinari Foundation - overwhelms us with excitement: after more than a hundred years, we find ourselves, like them, in the heart of photography."
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Third Episode
"Mrs. Marion Walsh with her horse", 1899
"A group portrait: Marion Walsh with her horse and her poodle. The calm and solid posture of the horse, Mrs. Marion’s tidiness, the typical orderly composition of Fratelli Alinari’s photographs are offered as a counterpoint to a careless poodle looking away and a wide opening in the backdrop. The shot is taken outdoors and the scenic backdrop is a trick used since antiquity to assess the sturdiness of foals' limbs. Marion’s horse is a beautiful animal and she must have ridden it quite a lot, probably also shortly before the shot, as the shining sweat on its coat and the white spot on its rump show: this latter is a depigmentation caused by the side saddle that women were still obliged to mount in the late nineteenth century".
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Second Episode
"Vanity", by Mario Nunes Vais, 1924
"It’s 1924. The blue writing under the portrait says : To the sublime Nunes Vais who gave life to the image of vanity with his admirable art. Rosa Spalletti Lanza is wearing a cloche hat and a sequined gown, a mix of circus costumes and exoticism. Under the draperies one can see she’s wearing trousers…Just a few years earlier, before the war, it would have been unimaginable to dress like that…. At her back a feather fan turns her into a peacock woman, like an icon of Art Nouveau. The author of this portrait is Mario Nunes Vais: being invited to his studio in Pian dei Giullari or Borgo degli Albizi in Florence was more or less a certificate of success. Many futurists as well as D’annunzio, Duse, Puccini, Guglielmo Marconi, Benedetto Croce and many more would call by. The Pantheon of renowned Italians at the beginning of the 20th century".
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First Episode
"Io + gatto" (I + cat), by Wanda Wulz, 1932
"Born and raised in Trieste in a photographers' family, Wanda Wulz has a knack for portraits and she will make them all life long like her father Charles has taught her, but developing in parallel her own artistic research. She experiments, manipulates and superimposes, feeling in tune with the Futurists’ poetics of the dynamism of pictures, free from the constraints of reality. "I + Cat" is a double portrait, superimposing Wanda’s and Mucincina's one, the family cat. It’s 1932 and Wanda creates here a different subject: the somatic traits merge to generate a hybrid, staring at viewers, capturing them with the expression of its eyes, a woman’s eye and a cat’s one. "I + Cat " is Wanda’s original self-presentation: an avant-garde artist who became popular all over the world, in the domain she was familiar with: photography".
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