ANTON GIULIO BRAGAGLIA (1890–1960)

ANTON GIULIO BRAGAGLIA (1890–1960) 'Lo Schiaffo' (The Slap), photodynamic, Rome 1912 Image Size: 16 x 22,6 cm Vintage silver print, sepia-toned, double-weight matte paper, mounted on original cardboard 34,5 x 31 cm, in excellent condition. Original wooden frame. Photographer's handwritten signature "Bragaglia ROMA" in ink in the image at lower left, his pictorial name stamp in blue ink on the reverse of the print, his label "Servizio Fotografico del teatro degli indipendenti, Via Avignonesi N. 8, Roma 104" on the reverse of the mount. PROVENANCE Acquired by the actual owner from estate of Luigi Freddi (1895–1977), founder of the "Centro Sperimentale di cinematografia" and "Cinecittà" in Rome, where Bragaglia worked. LITERATURE Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo Futurista, Torino 1970, ill. 6; Giovanni Lista, Fotografia Futurista, Milan 2015, p. 22. In 1910, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, together with his younger brother Arturo, began to develop a photographic technique to capture sequences of movement in long exposures, the futuristic "Fotodinamismo". This was not about an analysis of movement (as with Marey's chronophotography), but about doing justice to the aesthetic value of the trace of movement. The aim was to show the oscillations of the 'élan vital' as a dynamic flow, as it is invisible in perception. In "The Slap" this concerns both the gesture of the lunger and the fall of the slapped. In the founding manifesto of Futurism in 1909, Marinetti had praised the slap in addition to the fist - as a polemic-provocative attack on the "thought-heavy immobility of traditional art". Bragaglia's original print is a rare collector's item from an Italian private collection and has museum quality as a central work of Futurist photography.