Photography in the Twentieth Century

Oristano, potter's shop, detail. Photo by Max Leopold Wagner, from Sardegna Digital Library

During the twentieth century, the new technique spread widely and branched out into countless possible uses. In Sardinia, photography played a significant role in making the island better known. The first decades of the century were marked by photographers who documented the island before the great industrial and tourist transformations, laying the foundations for an increasingly lively interest, also supported by the literary discovery of Sardinia through the works of Grazia Deledda and Sebastiano Satta. From the middle of the century onward, photographers were joined by colleagues who travelled to the island, fascinated by its little-explored territory, rich in traditions and beauty: their internal and external gazes differed according to habits, expectations, and prejudices.
Many photographers left a lasting mark on the construction of Sardinia’s visual imagination. To give just a few examples, the Sassari-born Mario Pes (1887–1963) and Guido Costa (1871–1951) are well known. In Nuoro, the amateur photographers Raffaele Ciceri (1870–1921) and Piero Pirari (1886–1972) were active, alongside the painter Antonio Ballero (1864–1932) and the jurist and writer Sebastiano Satta (1867–1914). Also in Nuoro, Sebastiano Guiso (1891–1955) and his son Goffredo (1924–1983) worked professionally as photographers, running a studio specialized in portraits. In Sassari, Gino Canu Fadda operated after taking over the Lori photographic studio, alongside Studio Mannu.
Over the decades, the cultural and social panorama in which photography was situated changed considerably. Opening a portrait studio was no longer the only professional possibility; indeed, after the Second World War, photojournalism became the true protagonist in the maturation of photographic language. It was a particularly fertile period: these were the years when the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), one of the fathers of photojournalism, and the anthropologist Andreas W. F. Bentzon (1936–1971), with his wife Ruth Zedeler (1940), travelled to the island; Bentzon combined photography with the tools he used to observe and narrate Sardinian culture. Significant, too, are the Sardinian works of photographer and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky (1912–2016), the French humanist photographer Jean Dieuzaide (1921–2003), and Marianne Sin-Pfältzer (1926–2015), whose photography is characterized more by deep empathy than by documentary aspiration. She returned repeatedly to Sardinia from the 1950s onward, eventually settling in Nuoro in the early 2000s. A similar story is that of the Italo-Argentine photographer Pablo Volta (1926–2011), married to the writer Ornella Volta (1927–2020). He too began travelling to Sardinia in the 1950s for specific reports, until he settled there permanently in the 1980s, continuously documenting Barbagia, from the murals of Orgosolo to the carnival of Mamoiada, as well as nuraghi, Romanesque architecture, the miners of Carbonia and the salt pans of Cagliari, the reed huts of Sinis, and the farmers of Macomer. By contrast, the Romagna-born photographer Guido Guidi (1941) travelled to Sardinia only twice in his life: for his honeymoon in 1974 and forty years later, in 2011. In the final years of the last century, an entirely different generation of photographers emerged, expressing the need to move beyond documentation.
From an ethno-anthropological document of the rural world, shepherds, folklore, and popular traditions, from the postwar period onward photography became an authorial tool: today it is a language through which complex investigations can be conducted into cultural change, social identity, the Sardinian landscape, and the daily life of its inhabitants, as well as a fundamental medium for numerous contemporary artistic practices.

Bibliography
La fotografia in Sardegna. Lo sguardo esterno. Gli anni del Dopoguerra, a cura di M. Miraglia. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2009.
La fotografia in Sardegna. Lo sguardo esterno. 1960-1980, a cura di M. Miraglia. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2010.
La fotografia. Le origini 1839-1890, a cura di W. Guadagnini. Milano, Skira, 201
G. D’Autilia, Storia della fotografia in Italia dal 1839 ad oggi. Torino, Einaudi, 2012.

Update

4/9/2026 - 08:45