Still lifes by Giuseppe Cavalli: photography as art

Giuseppe Cavalli, Natura Morta - still life

"Blind Doll", 1938, Museo comunale d'Arte moderna e della Fotografia, Senigallia

These still lifes bear testimony to the fact that in his photographs, Giuseppe Cavalli (1904-1961) never gave in to documentarism. His work was always creative, a poetic synthesis in which – the artist once declared – the subject was completely meaningless, because “documents are not art; if they are, they are so in spite of their being documents”.

Cavalli was born in Foggia and started experimenting with photography in the 1930s; he was a fine intellectual, and a cinema, literature and music connoisseur. He wrote the first manifesto of “La Bussola” group: in those words, he summed up his vision of “photography as art”.