Looters, Photographers, and Thieves

Pasquale Verdicchio teaches literature, film, and cultural studies in the Department of Literature, University of California at San Diego. He is a founding member of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers.

• Chapter 1 AcknowledgementsChapter 2 IntroductionChapter 3 1. The Raw and the Cooked-UpChapter 4 2. Photography as Literary ArtChapter 5 3. Photographers, Looters, and Thieves: Stolen States of the Image/nationChapter 6 4. Giovanni Verga: Photography and VerismoChapter 7 5. Imagining America: The Photography of Lewis Hine and Jacob RiisChapter 8 6. Imaginative Contradictions: Von Gloeden's Disruptive Bodies of RepresentationChapter 9 7. Tina Modotti: Life through the Ground-glassChapter 10 NotesChapter 11 BibliographyChapter 12 Index

Pasquale Verdicchio’s Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries covers a diverse array of topics, from images of wax anatomical figures to Italo Calvino’s use of the medium. The breadth of Verdicchio’s knowledge often delights, and most readers will likely discover at least one aspect of “Italian photographic culture” with which they were unfamiliar before picking up his handsome tome. ... Verdicchio’s book is beautifully illustrated and laid out. . . . I found his epilogue one of the most delightful moments of the book. Examining a photograph that he himself took on the day that his family left Italy for Canada, “Autobiographical Post Face as a Way of Conclusion” is a beautiful musing on the emotional resonance of photographs for immigrants during the twentieth century. In the pre-Skype, pre-Facebook age, portrait photographs like the one Verdicchio so generously shares with us possessed—dare I say it?—the aura of selves we struggle to sculpt inside of, or in the shadow of, or in spite of, nationalist forces attempting to whittle us down to size.