MILANO, ITALIA

Mario Carrieri
MILANO, ITALIA

Photographs: Mario Carrieri

Publisher: Lerici

166 pages

Year: 1959

Comments: Hardcover under illustrated dust jacket, 29 x 25 cm. B&W photographs richly reproduced in gravure. Copy in very good condition . Scarce in that condition. Mentioned in Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol 1, page 214.

Mario Carrieri was a leading Italian photojournalist
and cinematographer who, as the endpaper of Milano,
italia informs us, abandoned all other projects and
commissions for two years between 1957 and 59 to
photograph Italy's largest city in a raw, cinematic
style. This was clearly derived from New York, by the
American photographer William Klein,
which was an enormous influence on both the style
and design of the photobook, especially in the coun-
tries in which it was published, including Italy.
Here, however, there is little of the wisecracking,
cynical, buffo style - Klein's word for his comic mode
of photography.* Milan is the hardest city in Italy, the
most dynamic and least sentimental, and Carrieri does
not spare us the more unattractive aspects of a thrust-
ing metropolis in which cormercial values hold sway
over everything else. He generaliy confines himself to
the city's grittier aspects, being drawn to the desolate
outer suburbs, and even when photographing the city's
glamorous centre, he manages to make it look dark
and dangerous. The weather, too, is co-opted into his
argument: his Milan seems a city of incessant drizzle
and snow.
At the time he made Milano Carrieri was associat-
ed with the Italian neo-realist photographers, such as
Cesare Columbo and Mario di Biasi, before he went on
to become a distinguished photographer of sculpture
He made books on other cities, but none this extreme.
Its concentration on the seamier side of life makes
Milano one of the most important works of the neo
realist tendency of the 1950s.