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Double exposures: The photographic afterlives of Pasolini and Moro

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-08, 08:27 authored by Sarah HillSarah Hill
Photographs play a crucial role in the ways the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro are remembered in Italian culture. Locating photographs of the two men taken before and after their murders against the backdrop of the changes in photographic practice that took place in Italy from the period of the economic boom in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, this article explores and compares the cultural meanings of the photographs of the bodies of these two very different but equally symbolic public figures, both alive and dead. Analysing the significance of these images in Italy in the 1970s and after, it notes how contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium - particularly in terms of understandings of mass media forms and the theoretical linking of photography and death - shaped how the photographs have been understood in relation to their social and political context. It argues that the afterimage of the photographs of the corpses of Pasolini and Moro is overlaid in Italian cultural memory over the visual record of the two men during their lives in a kind of mnemonic ‘double exposure’ that constitutes these bodies of images as collective icons of their times.

History

Preferred citation

Hill, S. (2016). Double exposures: The photographic afterlives of Pasolini and Moro. Modern Italy, 21(4), 409-425. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2016.46

Journal title

Modern Italy

Volume

21

Issue

4

Publication date

2016-01-01

Pagination

409-425

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Publication status

Published

Contribution type

Article

Online publication date

2016-11-28

ISSN

1353-2944

eISSN

1469-9877

Language

en