MOLLINO, Carlo - Polaroids

Background information

"In a career that spanned more than four decades, Carlo MOLLINO designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, he was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism.
In 1949 he published an important book on photography: 'Message from the Darkroom'. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women-mostly dancers-in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, he would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totaled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publically shown, until the acclaimed first edition of this volume was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing that book, The New Yorker declared, 'This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women.' Now back in print, with a newly designed cover, this beautiful volume offers a captivating portrait of a unique erotic sensibility.

Content

The photo volume, 'Carlo Mollino: Polaroids' is a collection of these photographs, selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973. The images are best described by adjectives closely associated with the presence of money: rich, sumptuous, lavish. They are all eroticized images of women, but the subject is not sex. It's clear that more so than the human body, Mollino was attracted to the aesthetic abstraction of beauty as a lifestyle. The photographs have been composed, staged and directed with the desire to conquer nature with artifice.

Book review

"The eros in Mollino's work assumes a melancholy, poisonous aspect with the understanding of the circumstances of its production: part of an aging bachelor's desire to perfect the decoration of his house. There is something of satyriasis, or Don Juanism, the male equivalent of nymphomania, in Carlo MOLLINO's work, as if they were undertaken compulsively, and perhaps without joy, as part of a doomed project to reach an unattainable ideal: the tragic desire to keep thousands of women in an empty house." (© Owen Campbell, in: American Suburb X)

About Italian photographer Carlo MOLLINO (1905-1973)

Books on the photographic work by Carlo MOLLINO