“Anyone who is not a beast and therefore has the awareness and dignity of a human being, the poorest human being who has never reneged on his own individuality, will feel this need: to be enchanted and to enchant, to express himself.” (Carlo MOLLINO, 1946)

About the Italian photographer, designer and architect, Carlo MOLLINO (1905-1973)

Carlo MOLLINO was an architect who committed equally to art and to technique, embodying the figure of the Italian Renaissance polymath in the context of modernity. He was a sportsman and a cultured intellectual, besides designing buildings, interiors, and furniture, he was a photographer, a writer, a skier, an aerobatic pilot, and a professor at the Polytechnic of Turin. In the 1930s he was among the very few architects, internationally speaking, to introduce elements of Surrealist art and culture into the Modern Movement. Free from any rigid ideological position, he went on to define a synthetic form of eclecticism that prefigured the contemporary. Taking nature as a source for both engineering and harmonious beauty, he was essentially in search of lightness and dynamism, qualities he animatedly infused into his organic architecture and furniture.
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.

Books on the photographic work of Carlo MOLLINO

  • 'Message from the Darkroom' (1949)
    'Carlo Mollino Polaroids' (2002, 2014)
    'Maniera moderna' (2011, by Chris Dercon)
    'Photographs 1934-1973' (2018, by Francesco Zanot)

The out-of-print photo volume 'Carlo Mollino: Polaroids' contains a selection of Polaroids from the 1960s and 1970s. These are eroticized images of women, but the subject is not sex. The images were composed and staged to conquer nature with artificiality
240,00 € Weight 1.6 kg
This out-of-print volume 'Maniera Moderna' is dedicated to the multifaceted work of Carlo MOLLINO. His surrealist roots can be seen in the black-and-white photographs and interiors of the 1930s to his later works as well as his staged erotic Polaroids.
168,00 € * Weight 1.1 kg