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Double exposures: the photographic afterlives of Pasolini and Moro

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2016

Sarah Patricia Hill
Sarah Patricia Hill*
Affiliation:
School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
*
*Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Photographs play a crucial role in the ways the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro are remembered in Italian culture. Locating photographs of the two men taken before and after their murders against the backdrop of the changes in photographic practice that took place in Italy from the period of the economic boom in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, this article explores and compares the cultural meanings of the photographs of the bodies of these two very different but equally symbolic public figures, both alive and dead. Analysing the significance of these images in Italy in the 1970s and after, it notes how contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium – particularly in terms of understandings of mass media forms and the theoretical linking of photography and death – shaped how the photographs have been understood in relation to their social and political context. It argues that the afterimage of the photographs of the corpses of Pasolini and Moro is overlaid in Italian cultural memory over the visual record of the two men during their lives in a kind of mnemonic ‘double exposure’ that constitutes these bodies of images as collective icons of their times.

Italian summary

La fotografia svolge un ruolo fondamentale nella memoria culturale della vita e della morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini e Aldo Moro. Il periodo tra il miracolo economico e gli anni settanta vede una serie di sviluppi importanti nella pratica fotografica, nel cui contesto l’articolo colloca le fotografie dei due uomini prima e dopo i loro assassinii, confrontando il significato culturale delle immagini fotografiche dei corpi e dei cadaveri di queste due differenti ma ugualmente iconiche figure. Soffermandosi sull’importanza che questi testi hanno assunto dagli anni settanta in poi, l’articolo analizza come il pensiero fotografico del tempo —soprattutto per quanto riguarda l’analisi delle forme mediatiche e del legame teorico tra fotografia e morte—abbia influito sulla loro comprensione in rapporto al contesto socio-politico. L’articolo dimostra come l’impronta visiva delle fotografie dei cadaveri di Pasolini e Moro sia sovrapposta nella memoria culturale alle immagini delle loro vite pubbliche, in una sorta di ‘doppia esposizione’ mnemonica che fa del intero album fotografico un’icona collettiva del loro tempo.

Keywords

Pier Paolo Pasolini, death ofAldo Moro, death ofphotography in Italyphotography theory and deathphotography and cultural memoryiconic images
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 21 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue: Iconic Images in Modern Italy: Politics, Culture and Society , November 2016 , pp. 409 - 425
Copyright
© 2016 Association for the Study of Modern Italy 

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