«Observing the anthropized landscape has helped me, over the years, to understand what the economy, power, history, culture, sociality, community life and the human soul are. […] But what over the years has really taught me to look and try to read the complexity and stratifications of the landscape are photographs, and the important work of photographers, which has gone beyond the boundaries of photography, to intertwine with literature, urban planning, sociology, anthropology”. Thus writes Roberta Valtorta in the introductory pages of the volume Writings 1983-2024. Photography and landscapepublished by Electa in the elegant “Writings” series, which brings together a wide selection of theoretical contributions and critical analyzes published over forty years. These words perfectly concentrate his way of understanding and investigating the medium of photography, as a tool for reflecting on the very act of seeing and therefore, on the lesson of the ancients, to know and access the perception of reality.
The common thread of these essays is landscape, the representation of landscape in photography. And it is no coincidence that this corpus opens with the writing dedicated to Trip to Italy (1983) published in “Progresso photographic” before the exhibition inaugurated in 1984: the project that marked the birth of what was defined as the “Italian school of landscape” and which will always remain at the center of his historical-critical research on our photography. For Valtorta, the collective experience conceived by Luigi Ghirri acted, in fact, as an essential point of reference for reading the Italian landscape, and not only that, a sort of unavoidable term of comparison on a visual, intellectual and emotional level.
It is starting from the important studies on Trip to Italy that Roberta Valtorta has investigated, like few others, the profound conceptual mutations that photography has experienced and which have allowed this language to generate stratifications within itself, keeping older meanings alive and combining them with ever-changing meanings. The analyzes of the Milanese historian and critic – and here lies the heart and value of her research – have always been attentive to the reconstruction of a cultural context which is the history of photography but also the more complex history of the world of images of Western culture. On the other hand, since the 1960s, both the practical and symbolic functions of photography within our society and culture have simultaneously changed and expanded. And from this awareness, as these writings demonstrate, it was necessary to start again to observe and analyze photography with a new gaze, an art born late within the thousand-year-old and complex history of Western art, which had the duty to find an identity, mature and then age rapidly. Perhaps also for this reason (but not only, certainly; ours is above all a tradition linked to painting, which has often looked at this expressive form with some prejudice) explains the lack, in Italy, of a consolidated tradition of “historical-critical writing on photography”, unlike other countries, such as the United States or France, I am thinking of John Szarkowski and Jean-Claude Lemagny, just to name a few. In our country, those who gave a significant theoretical and critical contribution to photography, also in terms of quality of writing, were Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Paolo Costantini (great talent, who passed away too prematurely) and certainly Roberta Valtorta. They were the first to understand, with acuteness, the profound changes that photography, even in Italy, had been going through since the Seventies, on the impetus of the previous decade, and of the need to recontextualize the critical approach within the broader cultural panorama, making this form dialogue with other disciplines and other knowledge, such as literature, art, cinema, territorial sciences. It can therefore be said that Valtorta has accompanied the work of many photographers towards this awareness, and that his critical writing has progressively grown and matured with the work of many artists, who not by chance have participated in Trip to ItalyI am thinking in particular of Luigi Ghirri, Mimmo Jodice, Gabriele Basilico, Mario Cresci, Guido Guidi, Vittore Fossati, but also Roberto Salbitani and Paolo Gioli, who later became, over the years, the elective authors of his research not only within the question of the relationship between photography and landscape.
The volume is divided by decades, of which it collects, as mentioned, a strong selection from a much larger corpus and is held together by constant reflection on the possible readings of the territories in transformation in relation to the themes of identity and memory (two poles that have always been essential and recurring in his research). In this direction, the most emblematic texts are certainly those concerning large public clients Space archivethe most important project created by Roberta Valtorta. An experience, which lasted from 1987 to 1997, which involved fifty-eight photographers (thirteen of whom were present in Trip to Italy) in a dense choral investigation of the stratified and complex territory around Milan, strongly marked by industrialization and the post-industrial phase; a commission that produced a collection of almost eight thousand photographs (preserved at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Cinisello Balsamo, which she herself helped to found and directed for many years) and today one of the largest containers of landscape photography from the end of the century. A project, as can also be seen from the author’s words, which also opens up to a more general reflection on the landscape we inhabit, on the transformations and wounds that have passed through it and still pass through it, “dragged into an unstoppable process of anthropization, fueled by a fast and destructive global economy”.
Valtorta writes in the essay Photography of places as photography (1997): «Today we can see clearly what we could imagine until a few years ago: precisely from the prolonged familiarity with the themes of contemporary landscape by many artists and from the persistence of these themes within the widespread cultural climate, those elastic languages have emerged with a liberating sign that today allow photography to grow as an all-round art, starting from every fragment, from every type of starting point that reality offers».
In these essays the scholar also insists a lot on the hypothesis and the need for collective work to try, through photography, to restore meaning to the contemporary landscape by questioning the possibilities of its possible narration today. «Group work – he writes – is used as a privileged method, often in public commissioning projects, to indicate that a more useful, complete and participatory reflection can derive from different visions of several photographers».
The unity and need for sharing work and initiatives has also informed his long experience as a teacher in various academies and schools, in particular at the Bauer center in Milan, where he taught history of art and photography for four decades. The work with students and the close relationship and continuous dialogue with the new generations of photographers (the essay that closes the volume is very interesting: Maps, landscapes, paths of thought (2024) dedicated, among others, to the work of Moira Ricci, Giorgio Barrera, Martina Della Valle) went hand in hand with her research in a sort of historical continuity, faithful – as it was for many authors with whom she worked – to an idea of culture not separated from civil commitment born in distant years, which wants art, photography, to also exist for others, for the community and within the destinies of human society. This is perhaps the most important teaching that emerges from the writings of this volume, almost a testament of someone who has literally dedicated their life to the research and studies of photography, a young art, strong however, as Roberta Valtorta explains, with a very dense history and responsible for having caused irreversible changes in communication and radically new attitudes in artistic making.
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