Occhio quadrato di Alberto Lattuada (1941): un libro fotografico alla verifica delle fonti d’archivio

Abstract

Alberto Lattuada’s book Occhio quadrato (1941) has come to be considered as a depiction of urban poverty in the outskirts of Milan during the fascist regime, a forerunner of Italian ‘neorealist’ photography, and an early response to the American documentary approach of the 1930s. Underscoring the limits of such narratological and stylistic readings of the photographic sequence, this essay argues for the importance of cross-analysis and philological research as a way to deconstruct the supposed self-referentiality of the book and to investigate the complex connections with the photographer’s archive from which it takes shape.