Page 38 - Milano Periferia

"barchessa" (rustic house) (112), the leasure time is organized by clubs
and centres run by priests (117, 118), the "Rondo del Rico" in Via Ripa-
monti with its bower emerges anew, as in a legend, close to the tram-
way in a whiteness of dawn or sunset (113).

With pleasure we see again these images, credulous that the old outskirts

still have throbs, palpitations of a bloodish vitality. Would to God they

were always like that! This illusion is moreover confirmed by the delightful

"collage" (121, 122, 123, 124) which places an old "Gilera" motor-
by side with a
b"riôket1tamsidme" typical suburban road, where the man of the
(the dustman) sweeps with the dignity of a professor his

small cart, with the hut which a strange fellow is decorating with a torn

piece of advertisement showing Alida Valli’s face, as sweet as a dream,

with a tangle of dazzling rails in front of a rustic isolated door among

barbed wires. Well-chosen combinations, after the splendid photograph

of the roundabout placed on a shining, a little disconnected piece of

ground: in the foreground those plump and homely mothers, those chil-

dren wearing Carnival clothes and in the background the loving cou-

ples, hugging each other, slinking away (119, 120). This image, more

than the others, condenses a meaning which the authors for reserve

and propriety never show off. A happy time has stopped as early

as 1920, with the style of that house which is seen in the back-

ground, which, within a short time, will probably be overlooked by a

horrid skyscraper. In the meanwhile let us meditate as that man (is he the

shepherd from Bergamo with the last flock seen one page before? Anyhow

they are spiritually alike) who, at about the middle of the book, seated on

the little hill of San Siro (52), seen from the back, the cap pulled over

his ears, vexed and thoughtful, looks at the spreading out of the immense

megalopolis. He has come from lands where a house does not yet mean

a money-investment; you can imagine his astonishment from the shoulder-

shrugging, from the contemplative posture. The two photographers share

the same contemplative attitude: they fearlessly try to decipher an ine-

xorably fleeting reality, to fix the danger, the continuous threat of becoming

ectoplasms, deformed and shapeless beings in a town half-destroyed, as

after a bombing raid carried out by the building-yards wanted by a consum-

ing society (53).

The merit of the book lies in its being free from alchemies and pretensions
of pictorialism, as well as (and it was so easy to be tempted by that)
from the pure Stieglitz-like photography. The same objectivity, as the
ruling principle of an art finally dominating the object, finishes by becom-
ing (and you can see that even in the great "Neue Sachlichkeit", whose
political implications will never deny the metaphysical premises and
certain outcomings of a Gothic-reminiscent Stylnovism) an expressive sym-
bolic abstraction (Max Deri) and therefore finishes by denying itself.

As regards photography, which is always influenced by realism (see San-
der), it is partly a different matter. It is a fact, however, that reality always
suffers from being interpreted by each operator according to his way of