Le immagini difficili. Considerazioni semiotiche sul ruolo della fotografia in “L’avventura di un fotografo” di Italo Calvino

With his tale “L’avventura di un fotografo”, from the book “Gli amori difficili”, Italo Calvino deals with the great difficulty in defining what kind of semiotic or artistic object photography represents. An image that duplicates the world, but also an image clearly divorced from a reality whose the camera can only freeze little instants. The main character of the tale struggles against photography, looking constantly for a solution to catch the truth with his camera. But he loses himself within the deceptive world of photography, that fools both on the perceptive level and on the cognitive one, so he never arrives at the end of his narrative program and he neither finds the true body of the woman he has fallen in love with. The tale is also a way for Calvino to resume a sort of history of what the human sciences have elaborated about photography, a difficult kind of image, that seems to become a real actor, able to orient and manipulate the action of the observer.