The Italian Photobook 1931-1941

This publication examines the most interesting and innovative photographic books appearing in the decade in which “modern” photography developed in Italy. The medium at that time oscillated between autonomous visual research (starting from the new experimentalism of the Futurists) and a “functional” use of photographic illustration in the two parallel and often intersecting fields of advertising and propaganda. In tracing the brief and intense history of graphic and photographic modernism in Italy, the book presents about 100 works by several of the period’s leading figures: Antonio Boggeri, Erberto Carboni, Franco Grignani, Bruno Munari, Giuseppe Pagano, and Luigi Veronesi.