Riccardo Moncalvo (1915 - 2008) - Serpe d'acqua, 1938

Lot description

Gelatin silver print, printed later cm 39,8 x 26,2 | 15.7 x 10.3 in. Photographer's credit stamp and Archivio Moncalvo stamp on the verso LITERATURE La fotografia di Riccardo Moncalvo, Tipografia Torinese Editrice, Turin, 1976 Sentieri di luce. Artisti fotografi a Torino dal 1930 al 1946, Circolo degli Artisti, Turin, 2002 B. Bergaglio (edited by), Riccardo Moncalvo. Fotografie 1932-1990, Milan, 2025 Riccardo Moncalvo (Turin 1915 - 2008) has always combined professional work done in the Atelier of Artistic and Industrial Photography founded in 1925 by his father Carlo Emilio and personal research. A member of the historic Subalpine Photographic Society, he started by publishing in the prestigious “Lights and Shadows Yearbook.” Also technically ingenious, he was among the first in Italy to use the handy Leica camera on which he applied a rotating turret to more quickly use three lenses of different focal lengths. He worked for architects such as Carlo Mollino and Ettore Sottsass and published several books. His laboratory was one of the first in the postwar period to make the first professional photographic prints. At the start of his career, the Turin-based photographer was drawn to the Romantic aesthetic, which he later abandoned – as can easily be seen here – in favour of a more austere and modern style of imagery, inspired by the New Objectivity movement. The essentiality of the lines and the geometric forms are prominent features in *Serpe d’acqua*, a photograph that demonstrates how a view of no particular merit can be captured with deliberate irony and transformed into an interesting subject. Always driven by a deeply innovative spirit, thirty years later Moncalvo ventured into colour: here too, he started from a traditional image to create a work that goes beyond mere description, leading to an exploration of colour played out entirely through the most delicate shades.