Goodbye to Carlo Bavagnoli, the great photographer who chronicled Sardinia
The only non-American on the Life magazine team, he died at 91. His reportages in Orani and in the heart of the island are famous
«The services were chosen according to their emotional strength, in an alternation of light tones and painful stories. Like life, in fact. But above all there was one thing: absolute rigor." The photographic story (which becomes a journalistic report) according to Carlo Bavagnoli, the great photographer who died at the age of 91. The only non-American to be part of the Life magazine team, a magazine that made history with reports such as the one on the Normandy landings.
Bavagnoli, with absolute rigor, also described, in great detail, Sardinia which was laboriously seeking the path to development after fascism and the war. The photographic reportage created in 1959 together with the journalist Livio Zanetti is extraordinary in terms of strength and emotional impact. A journey into the heart of a suffering island, promoted by the weekly L'Espresso, in the wake of the parliamentary investigation which had revealed the state of extreme poverty which characterized some areas of central Sardinia. A reportage, whose memory is fixed in the volume published by the Ilisso publishing house "Sardegna 1959, Africa at home" edited by Gino Satta and Salvatore Novellu, which is a flash of truth, between anthropology and sociology, on contexts, above all rural, and on the very expressive faces of men, women and children. Bavagnoli reaches Loculi and Irgoli, in Baronia, and with his shots he captures moments, profiles and scenarios.
In Orani with Nivola
Also of great importance is the reportage done in Orani on the sculptor Costantino Nivola discovering a sublime art. And on the technique of the master of photography, Rita Ladogana, professor of History of Contemporary Art at the University of Cagliari, explains that «apart from some carefully studied compositions, as in the image which exploits the presence of children intent on playing on the pipes of 'scaffolding set up for the set designer of the popular festival, overall a narrative vein prevails marked by a spontaneity in every shot. Open frames and long shots prevail which help to infuse depth and movement into every single scene." Carlo Bavagnoli, with his companions Ugo Mulas and Mario Dondero, recounted the twentieth century in many of its aspects, through the facts and protagonists of the "short century": from the opening of the Second Vatican Council to the death of Pope John XXIII to the subsequent election of Paul YOU. Many immortal shots. Historical images such as the one portraying Jane Fonda in the role of 'Barbarella' as well as social reportages, in line with those carried out in Sardinia, New York, Trastevere and among the 'scugnizzi' of Naples.
