Picturing the 'primitive': Photography, architecture, and the construction of Italian modernism, 1911--1936

During the first decades of the twentieth century, photography contributed to major transformations in architectural culture in Italy. Valued for its objectivity as well as its power to persuade, photography offered members of Italy's intellectual elite, including architects, ethnographers, social activists, and amateur enthusiasts, an effective way to research, represent, and interpret "primitive" forms of building -- original structures such as peasant huts and rural abodes -- as potent symbols of Italian tradition.;Between 1911, the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, and 1936, the year Italy's invasion of Ethiopia led to the declaration of the Fascist Empire, four large-scale exhibitions placed photographs of the country's "primitive" built domain in the center of critical debate surrounding the development of a civilized, modern architecture suitable for the Italian nation. These episodes form a fundamental framework through which to understand the broader political and cultural issues of Liberal and Fascist Italy.;While the organizers of these events had different agendas, they shared a desire to posit Italy's indigenous architecture as a source of inspiration for renewing the built environment and forging a national identity based on a common past. In photography, they found an ideal collaborator to make visible the country's autochthonous building tradition and assert its relevance to social problems of the period.;For those in search of new paradigms of architecture, photography provided an accurate, efficient, and technological means of note-taking to represent the modern qualities of the country's traditional structures: aesthetic merits of simplicity, sensitivity to different environments and climates, and use of local materials and construction techniques. For those who sought to frame a vision of Italian nationalism based on native customs and culture, photography offered an objective yet persuasive way to portray the indigenous built realm as a symbol of authentic, Italian tradition, even as ideologies of nationhood changed under Italy's Liberal and Fascist governments. In its universality -- its productive contribution to a range of disciplines -- photography enabled Italy's "primitive" building to take on a crucial role in the construction of Italian modernism.