In 1906, Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of Abruzzi, led an expedition to the summit of the Rwenzori, never climbed by a European before. Vittorio Sella, the Duke’s official photographer, documented the entire travel through photographs. Coming from an important industrial family of Biella, Sella marks the shift from an exclusively professional photographic practice (which was typical of the Eighteen century), to a wide spread diffusion of this technique among the growing bourgeoisie of the unified Italy. Images express the most important themes characteristic of that period: the enthusiasm towards scientific and technological progress and for the extraordinary mobility granted by the new communication systems, the curiosity for extra-European worlds framed in the colonial order. The photos of the expedition tell the story of the encounter with the population of East Africa and Uganda, recently subjected to the British Protectorate. In the “contact zone” (Pratt 2008), Sella realizes a visual representation of the territory and its inhabitants that on one side appears to be functional to its imperial appropriation, but on the other escapes the iconic canons typical of contemporary anthropology, which in Italy was dominated by a racial paradigm embodied in anthropometric photography. On the contrary, Sella depicts sophisticated human and natural landscapes, with all their complexity and fascination.
Immagini dalla “zona di contatto”. Le fotografie della spedizione italiana al Rwenzori (1906)
PENNACINI, Cecilia
2015-01-01
Abstract
In 1906, Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of Abruzzi, led an expedition to the summit of the Rwenzori, never climbed by a European before. Vittorio Sella, the Duke’s official photographer, documented the entire travel through photographs. Coming from an important industrial family of Biella, Sella marks the shift from an exclusively professional photographic practice (which was typical of the Eighteen century), to a wide spread diffusion of this technique among the growing bourgeoisie of the unified Italy. Images express the most important themes characteristic of that period: the enthusiasm towards scientific and technological progress and for the extraordinary mobility granted by the new communication systems, the curiosity for extra-European worlds framed in the colonial order. The photos of the expedition tell the story of the encounter with the population of East Africa and Uganda, recently subjected to the British Protectorate. In the “contact zone” (Pratt 2008), Sella realizes a visual representation of the territory and its inhabitants that on one side appears to be functional to its imperial appropriation, but on the other escapes the iconic canons typical of contemporary anthropology, which in Italy was dominated by a racial paradigm embodied in anthropometric photography. On the contrary, Sella depicts sophisticated human and natural landscapes, with all their complexity and fascination.
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