LAUSR

‘Humanist photography’, Caruso explains, ‘like social documentary photography or “concerned photography”, is considered to participate in a form of antifascism or social protest’ (4). Since half of Caruso’s book is concerned with the Mussolini era, she is obliged to pick among the historical debris for evidence of dissident photographers and their distinctive, antifascist ‘humanist’ photography. This is a difficult case to make: whilst there were, clearly, photographers who resisted fascism, and some who contributed to resistance propaganda in the closing stages of the Second World War, Caruso provides scant evidence of a developed antifascist photographic tradition in the pre-war period, or that such photography can be readily distinguished from the images published in pro-fascist magazines such as Tempo (21). For example, a 1932 image of welldressed Italian mothers and their babies, by the magazine editor Leo Longanesi, is ‘fascist’ in intent; a comparable photograph of a poor family, from the same year, becomes an example of Longanesi’s equivocal ‘humanism’ (34–35). According to Caruso, ‘[i]t is difficult to place Longanesi in the history of humanist photography because of the ambiguities of his persona’ (36); the problem, it seems to me, is that the author too readily equates photographs with the ideology and politics of their maker, and insists on single, univocal readings of their meanings. In the emerging global visual culture of modernism, images were, after all, instrumentalised for different causes, with magazines from across the political spectrum presenting similar photographs, and invoking the common ideal of a hygienic, prosperous, technological modernity.