According to legend, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), one of the putative fathers of photography, conceived the idea for his proto-photographic experiments while off the coast of Cagliari during the French siege of the city between 1792 and 1793. Correspondence with his brother documents that he refined these ideas during a long stay in the Sardinian city between 1796 and 1798. After returning to France, Niépce, in collaboration with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), developed the process that led to the official birth of photography, presented to the French people in 1839. It was not a solitary invention: many other enthusiasts and scholars from different disciplines, from optics to chemistry, were engaged at the same time, often unaware of one another, in experiments that led to further discoveries and creations, updating and perfecting the photography of Daguerre and Niépce. The new technique spread rapidly: from France it reached Italy, first of all Turin, finding fertile ground in many cities. Sardinia also responded promptly, perhaps thanks to a privileged connection with Savoy culture, and photography attracted members of the circles of the emerging commercial bourgeoisie and intellectual elites, so that by the end of the nineteenth century there were already half a dozen professional photographic studios, alongside numerous dilettantes and amateurs. In 1844 the Parisian Claudi Porraz opened one of the first photographic studios in Cagliari, where he produced daguerreotype portraits. But as early as 1843 Father Stefano Sirigo, professor of physics at the Royal University of Cagliari, had published his Lezioni di fisica sperimentale, a volume in which he devoted a paragraph to photography and the secrets of the camera obscura, contributing significantly to their dissemination. On 12 February 1871, on the occasion of the First Sardinian Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition in Cagliari, Agostino Lay Rodriguez (1829–1903) exhibited photographs of traditional costumes for the first time, in prints of different formats, inaugurating a highly successful strand of Sardinian photographic production. Lay Rodriguez was one of the first and principal promoters of photography in Sardinia, owner of a flourishing studio in Cagliari, which was taken over after his death by Evaristo Mauri, himself already active as a photographer. In 1972, the Sardinian capital counted four documented photographic studios: in addition to Agostino Lay Rodriguez, the pharmacist and chemist Giuseppe Luigi Cocco had been operating there since 1866, also collaborating with Raffaele Lay Loi, Lay Rodriguez’s half-brother. Eugenio Aruj and Raffaele Gamba were also active, followed in the 1880s by the Livornese Raffaello Canzani and Alfredo Nissim. In a short time, photographic studios spread to the island’s main centres. In Nuoro worked the photographer G. Camedda Nieddu, in Oristano Achille Parnicich, and in Sassari, alongside the studio of the French photographer Jean Mailland, Luigi Kürner and Felice Oderna. All the first professional photographers worked mainly as portraitists, producing the so-called cartes de visite: created to make the fullest possible use of an emulsified plate, these were portraits printed in the 5.4 × 8.9 cm format, mounted on cards that often bore the author’s signature, stamp, or logo on the reverse. The production of the atlas of island traditional costumes carried out by Lay Rodriguez, however, had distinctive features, becoming an overall project in its own right that included numerous individual full-length portraits, created to be reproduced countless times, perhaps coloured, and sold as souvenirs. The same author also devoted himself to photographic documentation of the mines of the Iglesiente, laying the foundations for a deeper awareness of the capacities and potential of the photographic medium, a flexible language capable from the very beginning of its history of telling any story or context.

Bibliograpy
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