The Twentieth Century

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

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sardinia, especially in the interior, was essentially still intact in its uses, traditions, clothes and language, all aspects that had now been standardized or erased by modernity everywhere. The isolation, which in many sectors had limited its development and growth, had allowed it to preserve archaic and primitive life patterns, a source of strong appeal for scholars and travelers.

The early 20th century,
Max Leopold Wagner was one of the first scholars to arrive on the island in the early 20th century to study its language and culture. He combined his tools with the photographic medium, with which he documented work tools, housing types, views and panoramas of countries.
Between 1905 and 1917 Vittorio Sella, a founding member of one of the most prestigious Sardinian wineries, photographed the different phases of vineyard planting in the Alghero area and explored the island by car, immortalizing landscapes, village festivals and scenes of life.
A few years later Vittorio Alinari created with unsurpassed professionalism several hundred images depicting landscapes, urban views, archaeological remains and works of art.
Between 1916 and 1926, the American magazine “National Geographic” published three articles related to Sardinia, richly illustrated by the images of Adams, Wright and Pellerano.
Ferri, Leporati and Pes from Cagliari, as well as for the rich documentation of the Iglesias mining plants and the Carbonia and Arborea construction, should also and above all be remembered for their precious repertoire of ethnographic images.
In 1927, the German August Sander arrived on the island, engaged at the time in a work of documenting the different human types. To him we owe a series of portraits, architectural and landscape photographs of undoubtedly charm and perfect technique.
At the end of the 1930s, the architect Giuseppe Pagano photographed the typical architecture of Sulcis and the innovative building development of the mining center of Carbonia.

The Second Twentieth Century
With the Second World War, there was a profound and radical rethinking of cultural and artistic dynamics, which also concerned photography: the first photonews agencies were born, mainly linked to the illustration of newspapers, and the figure of the photojournalist was consolidated.
In the early 1950s, Sardinia was the destination of the most important national and international reporters, first of all Patellani, who addressed issues at the forefront of those years such as banditry and the processes of modernization of human life and work, also investigated by the photographers of the Magnum Photos agency: Bischof, Seymour, Taconis and, in the early Sixties, Cartier Bresson and Barbey.
At the same time, the famous “Investigation on Orgosolo” by the Sicilian anthropologist Cagnetta recalls Volta, Pinna, De Martiis and the Americans Machlin and Klein to the island. At the center of their reports is the banditry that in those years bloodied the most turbulent villages of Barbagia.
These are also the main themes of the first reports made in his homeland by Franco Pinna. Also important are those on the rite of “argia”, on the mining world and later on the trade union demands of the pastoral world.
The Danish ethnomusicologist Weis Bentzon's documentary work on launeddas also dates back to the same years.
The trend of touristic photographic documentation also had a strong impetus, linked to the proliferation of illustrated guides; the absolute protagonists were the photographers Stefani (who also distinguished himself for his works of the highest level in Iglesiente and Barbagia), Ciganovic and the German Pfältzer.
De Biasi is the other great reporter who, in the mid-1950s, investigates and captures with his lens the most curious and interesting aspects of a society that is still substantially intact, but also captures the first signs of change.
In the following decades, some of the most prestigious names in Italian and international photography followed one another on Sardinian soil: Roiter, Bavagnoli, Berengo Gardin, Scianna and Koudelka.