M. Antonella Pelizzari

Professor of 19th- and 20th- Century History of Photography

Professor Antonella Pelizzari’s work in the history of photography focuses on issues of cultural representation and the intersection of photography with politics. She was curator of photography at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, where she organized a major touring exhibition (CCA, YCBA, Fowler Museum) and book, Traces of India. Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900 (CCA Historians of British Art Book Prize). She has continued to curate exhibitions and publications at Hunter College and in Montreal, which have touched on questions of documentary, urban gentrification, and the representation of race (Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context (1950s-Present); Framing Communities: Magnum Photos, 1947-Present; 125^th Street: Photography in Harlem; Susan Meiselas: Encounters with the Dani: From the Stone age to the Digital Age).

Professor Pelizzari specializes on Italian visual culture and has written extensively on nation-building and modernity in art, photography, and the printed media. She is currently co-editing a scholarly anthology on photography and the illustrated periodicals (Getty Publications) and is working on a manuscript on interwar Italian popular weeklies and cinema. Her publications have appeared on Modernism/Modernity, History of Photography, Visual Resources, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Modern Italy, Artforum, Afterimage, Aperture, Photography and Culture. She has supervised dissertations on photography and nation-building, colonialism and race, the role of gender in photojournalism and printed media.

Selected Publications:

• “Circulating Photographs,” Guest-editor, History of Photography, Spring 2022, 45:1
• The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination, 1840-1900 (London: Yale University Press, 2022) https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300263831
• 125^th Street: Photography in Harlem (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2022) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/Other/bo120140849.html
• “Media Convergence in Angelo Rizzoli’s periodicals: La Signora di tutti (1934),” in Print Matters: Histories of Photography in Illustrated Magazines, M.A. Pelizzari and Andres Mario Zervigon eds., (Los Angeles: Getty Publications - in progress, 2022)
• “Susan Meiselas’ Kurdistan. In the Shadow of History,” in Collaboration. A Potential History of Photography, Ariella Azoulay, Laura Wexler, et als., eds., (London: Thames & Hudson – in progress, 2022)
• “Beyond Time: Luigi Ghirri’s Paesaggio Italiano,” in Senza Margini, Stefano Chiodi, ed., (Rome: MAXXI and Marsilio, 2021), 107-123
• “Facts and Fantasies: Photography and Camouflage in 1930s Italian Illustrated Media,” Modernism/Modernity, 26:3 (Fall 2019): 563-594
• “The Charade of Bruno Munari’s Fotocronache (1944),” in Bruno Munari. The Lightness of Art (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 133-191
• “Make-believe: Fashion and Cinelandia in Rizzoli’s Lei (1933-1938),” Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 20:1 (2015): 34-52
• Painting in Italy 1910s-1950s: Futurism, Abstraction, Concrete Art (Turin: Umberto Allemandi; New York: Sperone Westwater Gallery, 2015) https://www.speronewestwater.com/catalogues/painting-in-italy#tab:slideshow
• “Futurist Photography: Tato and the 1930s,” in Italian Futurism, 1909-1944. Reconstructing the Universe, Vivien M. Greene, ed., (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014), 294-299
• “Between Two Worlds: The Art of Luigi Ghirri,” Artforum (April 2013): 206-211; 280
• “Un Paese (1955) and the Challenge of Mass Culture,” études photographiques, 30 (December 2012): 116-140
• Photography and Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2011) http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781861897695
• Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850-1900 (New Haven and Montreal: Yale University Press and CCA, 2003)
• https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300098969/traces-india