Marcella Pedone’s forgotten archive: photographs and films of an identity journey through the landscapes of a lost Italy

Abstract

In the polyphony of feminine gazes of post-World War II Italian documentary photography, Marcella Pedone (Rome, 1919 - Milan, 2023) occupies a place of absolute prominence. She has remained on the margins of official historiography despite the two features of unquestionable uniqueness that characterize her: first, the production of an impressive visual archive consisting of 170.000 color images taken between the early 1950s and the late 1990s, and, subsequently, the methodological paradigm of her photographic practice that led her to travel solo throughout the country with the aim of shaping a multifaceted visual atlas of the Italian province and delineating the complete portrait of a country poised between backwardness and modernity, rurality and the push toward progress. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she does not analyze single microcosms, but creates with scientific rigor the portrait of an entire nation in its landscape, social, economic and folkloric components, thus constructing a visual mosaic capable of rescuing lost worlds of Italian reality from the flight of time and becoming a fundamental piece of national memory.

Keywords

• visual atlas
• documentary photography
• photography as a source of history
• gender photography
• etnographic photography