Giuseppe Cavalli

This book offers an exhaustive overview of Giuseppe Cavalli’s favourite themes, publishing the large photograph collection of the Cavalli fonds belonging to the archive of the Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna e della Fotografia in Senigallia.
From the very first glance, the word that comes to mind is purity: the limpid thought of forms stripped of any extraneous aspects, distinct and rigorous thought that marshals the beings and the objects photographed and impresses a clear spatial rhythm on them. The true domain of photography is grey, a grey with a granular texture that vibrates with the intimate variations of its grain, the nuances of expanses of sand. There is also a lyricism of overall light in Giuseppe Cavalli’s work. It causes all the space to vibrate and finely traces the sharpness of the clear, distinct lines that lend it rhythm but leave intact the mystery of its pure, serene expanse.

Born in 1904, Giuseppe Cavalli started taking photographs during the second half of the 1930s, immediately distinguishing himself with his very personal style.
His work and the reflection on aesthetics promoted by the photographic groups that he founded – La Bussola in 1947 and Misa in 1954 – formed the bases for the photographic idiom understood as an autonomous artistic language, in contrast with the rhetorical Fascist formulae, capable of representing a concept of pure, essential and rigorous expression, with an elevated tone. He continued his artistic and research activities until his death in 1961.