Hidden Cities: A Photobook

HIDDEN CITIES

Italo Calvino’s beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor’s travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

“The question that Calvino seems to be asking is a big one: How should we live?” —ERIC WEINER

Calvino’s elusiveness comes also from the honesty with which he develops his series. “Invisible Cities” is an elegy, autumnal and melancholy. Cities do move more and more toward failure, and toward the end of the book Procopia, the last of the “Continuous Cities,” is so crowded that the people hide the place and even the sky. And there is Penthesilea, less an “aggregation of opaque polyhedrons on the horizon” than a limbo of endless outskirts. But the reader finds something more interesting here than decline and fall. Even the cities that exhibit delusion and degeneration remain the possibilities from which, as Marco tells the Khan, any crystal‐perfect community whose molecula’r form the Khan dreams of must in be calculated.

Writtern by ITALO CALVINO

Excerpts from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

HIDDEN CITIES

INVISIBLE CITIES

The Baron in the Trees

The Castle of Crossed Destinies Cosmicomics

Difficult Loves

If on a winter’s night a traveler Invisible Cities

Italian Folktales

Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city

Mr. Palomar

The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount t zero

Under the Jaguar Sun

The Uses of Literature

The Watcher and Other Stories

TITLES BY ITALO CALVINO

Copyrigth © 1972 by Giuglio Einaudi Editore

English translation copyright © 1974 by Harcourt Brace & Company

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please write Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 215 Park Avenue South New York NY 10003.

Layout and typesetting: Pho Vu

Text: Italo Calvino

Photographs: Robert Capa, Berenice Abbott, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, Brassaï, Jerry Uelsmann, Vivian Maier

Format: 180x240 mm

ISBN: 0156453800

Incheon, South Korea

May 2023

HIDDEN CITIES

INVISIBLE CITIES

HARCOURT BRACE & COMPANY (1974)

001 002 003

INTRODUCTION

Le città invisibili.

HIDDEN CITIES

One ROBERT CAPA

Hungarian, 1913-1954

BERENICE ABBOT

American, 1898–1991

AARON SISKIND

American, 1903–1991

HIDDEN CITIES

Two PAUL STRAND

American, 1890–1976

010 011

HIDDEN CITIES

Three BRASSAÏ

French, born Hungary, 1899–1984

HIDDEN CITIES

Four MARIO GIACONELLI

Italian, 1925–2000

HIDDEN CITIES

Five JERRY UELSMANN

American, 1934–2022

INTRODUCTION

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last he last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual

tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.

Le città invisibili.

Allied troops in Paris attaching Germans entrenched in public buildings, 11 September, 1944.

One HIDDEN CITIES

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squares, the horse-racing track.

That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses it toward the outside.

Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged, but maintaining their proportions on a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and

of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are already blossoming though it is hard to discern them—the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.

...The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying bis conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.

ROBERT CAPA

October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954

BIOGRAPHY

Robert Capa was a Hungarian–American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history.

Friedman had fled political repression in Hungary when he was a teenager, moving to Berlin, where he enrolled in college. He witnessed the rise of Hitler, which led him to move to Paris, where he met and began to work with his professional partner Gerda Taro, and they began to publish their work separately. He subsequently covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers. He was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.

Capa was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, where his parents were tailors; Capa’s mother was a successful fashion shop owner, and his father was an employee of her shop. Capa had two brothers: a younger brother, photographer Cornell Capa and an older brother, László Friedmann. Cornell moved to Paris in 1936 to join his older brother Capa, where he found an interest in photography instead of staying in the field of medicine. Not much is known of Capa’s older brother László, except that he married Angela Maria Friedmann-Csordas in 1933. He died a year later and was buried next to his father in the Kozma Utca Jewish Cemetery.

At the age of 18, Capa moved to Vienna, later relocated to Prague, and finally settled in Berlin: all cities that were centers of artistic and cultural ferment in this period. He started studies in journalism at the German Political College, but the Nazi Party instituted restrictions on Jews and banned them from colleges. Capa relocated to Paris, where he adopted the name ‘Robert Capa’ in 1934. At that time, he had already been a hobbyphotographer.

Capa is known for redefining wartime photojournalism. His work came from the trenches as opposed to the more arms-length perspective that was the precedent. He was famed for saying,

If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.

The origin of the quote can be traced back to an interview Capa gave to the journalist Richard Whelan in 1947 for the book “The Bitter Years: Edward Steichen and the Farm Security Administration Photographs.” In the interview, Capa discussed his experiences photographing the D-Day nvasion during World War II. When asked about the close proximity of his images, Capa replied, “The pictures are there, and you just take them. If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

Over time, the quote has become synonymous with Capa’s approach to photography and his bold, immersive style of capturing images in the midst of intense situations. It is often cited as an inspiration for photographers, emphasizing the importance of proximity and intimacy with the subject matter to create powerful and impactful photographs.

ROBERT CAPA

Hungarian, 1913-1954

Then Marco Polo spoke: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist.”

Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knew how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not this fluency that amazed him.

“Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum’s nest; not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree’s being chosen for chopping down ... This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding....”

The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows....

The Great Khan owns an atlas where all the cities of the empire and the neighboring realms an drawn, building by building and street by street, with walls, rivers, bridges, harbors, cliffs. He realizes that from Marco Polo’s tales it is pointless to expect news of those places, which for that matter he knows well: how at Kambalu, capital of China, three square cities stand one within the other, each with four temples and four gates that are opened according to the seasons; how on the island

of Java the rhinoceros rages, charging, with his murderous horn; how pearls are gathered on the ocean bed off the coasts of Malabar.

Kublai asks Marco, “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?”

BERENICE ABBOTT

July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991

BIOGRAPHY

Berenice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.

Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio and brought up in Ohio by her divorced mother, née Lillian Alice Bunn (m. Charles E. Abbott in Chillicothe OH, 1886).

She attended Ohio State University for two semesters, but left in early 1918 when her professor was dismissed because he was a German teaching an English class. She moved to New York City, where she studied sculpture and painting. In 1921 she traveled to Paris and studied sculpture with Emile Bourdelle. While in Paris, she became an assistant to Man Ray, who wanted someone with no previous knowledge of photography. Abbott took revealing portraits of Ray’s fellow artists.

Her university studies included theater and sculpture. She spent two years studying sculpture in Paris and Berlin. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. During this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, “Berenice,” at the suggestion of Djuna Barnes. In addition to her work in the visual arts, Abbott published poetry in the experimental literary journal transition. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Later, she wrote: “I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else.” Ray was impressed by her darkroom work and allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs. In 1921 her first major works was in an exhibition in the Parisian gallery Le Sacre du Printemps. After a short time studying photography in Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1927 and started a second studio, on the rue Servandoni.

Photography helps people to see.

Berenice Abbott is an American photographer known for her documentary and street photography. Abbott’s work played a significant role in capturing the essence of New York City during the 1930s.

The quote reflects Abbott’s belief in the power of photography as a medium to enhance perception and understanding. She saw photography as a tool that could not only capture the visible world but also reveal hidden truths and encourage viewers to engage more deeply with their surroundings. Through her photographs,

Abbott aimed to provide a fresh perspective and to awaken people’s awareness of the world around them.

Abbott’s statement emphasizes the ability of photography to uncover and communicate stories, to shed light on aspects of life that may otherwise go unnoticed. It suggests that photography has the capacity to open people’s eyes, to encourage them to observe and appreciate the world in a more meaningful and perceptive way.

Berenice Abbott, West Street, 1938, Silver Gelatin Photograph

BERENICE ABBOTT

American, 1898–1991

Kublai asks Marco,

Kublai asks Marco, “When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?”

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

“At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, when all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”

The Great Khan owns an atlas whose drawings depict the terrestrial globe all at once and continent by continent, the borders of the most

distant realms, the ships’ routes, the coastlines, the maps of the most illustrious metropolises and of the most opulent ports. He leafs through the maps before Marco Polo’s eyes to put his knowledge to the test. The traveler recognizes Constantinople in the city which from three shores dominates a long strait, a narrow gulf, and an enclosed sea; he remembers that Jerusalem is set on two hills, of unequal height, facing each other; he has no hesitation in pointing to Samarkand and its gardens.

For other cities he falls back on descriptions handed down by word of mouth, or he guesses on the basis of scant indications: and so Granada, the streaked pearl of the caliphs; Lübeck, the neat, boreal port; Timbuktu, black with ebony and white with ivory; Paris, where millions of men come home every day grasping a wand of bread. In colored miniatures the atlas depicts inhabited places of unusual form: an oasis hidden in a fold of the desert from which only palm crests peer out is surely Nefta; a castle amid quicksands and cows grazing in meadows salted by the tides can only suggest Mont-Saint-Michel; and a palace that instead of rising within a city’s walls contains within its own walls a city can only be Urbino.

The atlas depicts cities which neither Marco nor the geographers know exist or

where they are, though they cannot he missing among the forms of possible cities: a Cuzco on a radial and multipartite plan which reflects the perfect order of its trade, a verdant Mexico on the lake dominated by Montezuma’s palace, a Novgorod with bulb-shaped domes, a Lhassa whose white roofs rise over the cloudy roof of the world. For these, too, Marco says a name, no matter which, and suggests a route to reach them. It is known that names of places change as many times as there are foreign languages; and that every place can be reached from other places, by the most various roads and routes, by those who ride, or drive, or row, or fly.

“When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?”

AARON SISKIND

December 4, 1903 – February 8, 1991

BIOGRAPHY

Aaron Siskind was an American photographer whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement, and was close friends with painters Franz Kline (whose own breakthrough show at the Charles Egan Gallery occurred in the same period as Siskind’s one-man shows at the same gallery), Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.

Siskind was born in New York City, growing up on the Lower East Side. Shortly after graduating from City College, he became a public school English teacher. Siskind was a grade school English teacher in the New York Public School System for 25 years, and began photography when he received a camera as a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon.

Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League, where he produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s, among them “Harlem Document”.

In the 1940s, Siskind lived above the Corner Book Shop, at 102 Fourth Avenue in Manhattan; he also maintained a darkroom at this location.

In 1950 Siskind was the first to obtain the guggenheim grant met Harry Callahan when both were teaching at Black Mountain College in the summer, where he also met Robert Rauschenberg who throughout his life always kept a particular Siskind print on his work wall (see MOMA retrospective 2017). Later, Callahan persuaded Siskind to join him as part of the faculty of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. In 1971 he followed Callahan (who had left in 1961) by his invitation to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, until both retired in the late 1970s.

Siskind was born in New York City, growing up on the Lower East Side. Shortly after graduating from City College, he became a public school English teacher. Siskind was a grade school English teacher in the New York Public School System for 25 years, and began photography when he received a camera as a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon.

Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League, where he produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s, among them “Harlem Document”.

In the 1940s, Siskind lived above the Corner Book Shop, at 102 Fourth Avenue in Manhattan; he also maintained a darkroom at this location.

Siskind was an influential American photographer known for his abstract and expressive photography, particularly in the realms of documentary and street photography.

The quote reflects Siskind’s profound understanding of the emotional and lasting impact that photography can have. Siskind believed that throughthe act of photography, one could not only capture visual moments but also convey and evoke deep emotions. He saw the camera as a tool that allowed photographers to connect with their subjects and the world around them on a profound level.

Siskind’s quote suggests that a photograph has the ability to preserve memories and emotions that might

otherwise fade away with time. It implies that the act of photographing is an act of love and a means of capturing the essence of a moment. According to Siskind, even the smallest details that might be forgotten by the human mind can be retained through photography, serving as a lasting testament to the experiences and emotions captured in the image.

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

AARON SISKIND

Hungarian, 1913-1954

“I think you recognize cities better on the atlas than when you visit them in person,” the emperor says to Marco, snapping the volume shut.

The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one.

And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”

The Great Khan owns an atlas in which are gathered the maps of all the cities: those whose walls rest on solid foundations, those which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, those that will exist one day and in whose place now only hares’ holes gape.

Marco Polo leafs through the pages; he recognizes Jericho, Ur, Carthage, he points to the landing at the mouth of the Scamander where the Achaean ships waited for ten years to take the besiegers back on board, until the horse nailed together by Ulysses

was dragged by windlasses through the Scaean gates. But speaking of Troy, he happened to give the city the form of Constantinople and foresee the siege which Mohammed would lay for long months until, astute as Ulysses, he had his ships drawn at night up the streams from the Bosporus to the Golden Horn, skirting Pera and Galata. And from the mixture of those two cities a third emerged, which might be called San Francisco and which spans the Golden Gate and the bay with long, light bridges and sends open trams climbing its steep streets, and which might blossom as capital of the Pacific a millennium hence, after the long siege of three hundred years that would lead the races of the yellow and the black and the red to fuse with the surviving descendants of the whites in an empire more vast than the Great Khan’s.

The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the form of cities that do not yet have a form or a name. There is the city in the shape of Amsterdam, a semicircle facing north, with concentric canals—the princes’, the emperor’s, the nobles’; there is the city in the shape of York, set among the high moors, walled, bristling with towers; there is the city in the shape of New Amsterdam known also as New York, crammed with towers of glass and steel on an oblong island between two rivers, with streets like deep canals, all of them straight, except Broadway.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles, in the shape of KyōtoŌsaka, without shape.

2

HIDDEN CITIES 1

In Raissa, life is not happy. People wring their hands as they walk in the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their fists to their temples. In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins. At the workbenches where, every moment, you hit your finger with a hammer or prick it with a needle, or over the columns of figures all awry in the ledgers of merchants and bankers, or at the rows of empty glasses on the zinc counters of the wineshops, the bent heads at least conceal the general grim gaze. Inside the houses it is worse, and you do not have to enter to learn this: in the summer the windows resound with quarrels and broken dishes.

PAUL STRAND

October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976

BIOGRAPHY

Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. It was while on a field trip in this class that Strand first visited the 291 art gallery – operated by Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – where exhibitions of work by forward-thinking modernist photographers and painters would move Strand to take his photographic hobby more seriously. Stieglitz later promoted Strand’s work in the 291 gallery itself, in his photography publication Camera Work, and in his artwork in the Hieninglatzing studio. Some of this early work, like the well-known Wall Street, experimented with formal abstractions (influencing, among others, Edward Hopper and his idiosyncratic urban vision). Other of Strand’s works reflect his interest in using the camera as a tool for social reform. When taking portraits, he would often mount a false brass lens to the side of his camera while photographing using a second working lens hidden under his arm. This meant that Strand’s subjects likely had no idea he was taking their picture.It was a move some criticized.

Paul Strand was born Nathaniel Paul Stransky on October 16, 1890, in New York; his Bohemian parents were merchant Jacob Stransky and Matilda Stransky (née Arnstein). When Paul was 12, his father gave him a camera as a present.

In his late teens, he was a student of a renowned

Strand was one of the founders of the Photo League, an association of photographers who advocated using their art to promote social and political causes. Strand and Elizabeth McCausland were “particularly active” in the League, with Strand serving as “something of an elder statesman.” Both Strand and McCausland were “clearly left-leaning,” with Strand “more than just sympathetic to Marxist ideas.” Strand, McCausland, Ansel Adams, and Nancy Newhall all contributed to the League’s publication, Photo News.

In 1948, CBS commissioned Strand to contribute a photo for an advertisement captured “It is Now Tomorrow”: Strand’s photo showed television antennas atop New York City.

Strand married the painter Rebecca Salsbury on January 21, 1922. He photographed her frequently, sometimes in unusually intimate, closely cropped compositions. After divorcing Salsbury, Strand married Virginia Stevens in 1935. They divorced in 1949; he then married Hazel Kingsbury in 1951 and they remained married until his death in 1976.

The timing of Strand’s departure to France is coincident with the first libel trial of his friend Alger Hiss, with whom he maintained a correspondence until his death. Although he was never officially a member of the Communist Party, many of Strand’s collaborators were either Party members (James Aldridge; Cesare Zavattini) or prominent socialist writers and activists (Basil Davidson). Many of his friends were also Communists or suspected of being so (Member of Parliament D. N. Pritt; film director Joseph Losey; Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid; actor Alex McCrindle). Strand was also closely involved with Frontier Films, one of more than 20 organizations that were identified as “subversive” and “un-American” by the US Attorney General. When he was asked by an interviewer why he decided to go to France, Strand began by noting that in America, at the time of his departure, “McCarthyism was becoming rife and poisoning the minds of an awful lot of people.”

The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Paul Strand was an influential American photographer and filmmaker known for his contributions to modern photography and his documentary-style images.

This quote reflects Strand’s perspective on the creative process and the artist’s mindset. It suggests that an artist, including a photographer, possesses a boundless world of inspiration and creative possibilities. According to Strand, the artist’s world is not confined to a specific location or limited by physical boundaries. Instead, it is an expansive realm that can be found in any setting, whether it be far away or right at their doorstep.

Strand’s quote encourages artists, including photographers, to embrace the idea that creativity and inspiration can be found anywhere.

It emphasizes the importance of being open to the beauty and possibilities that surround us, no matter how mundane or ordinary they may initially seem. The quote suggests that the artist’s perception and ability to see and appreciate the world are crucial in finding extraordinary moments and capturing them through their chosen medium.

PAUL STRAND

Hungarian, 1913-1954

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, “Darling, let me dip into it,” to a young serving-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white

lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: “Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels,

then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”

3

HIDDEN CITIES 1

A sibyl, questioned about Marozia’s fete, said, “I see two cities: one of the rat, one of the swallow.”

BRASSAÏ

BIOGRAPHY

Brassaï was a Hungarian–French photographer, sculptor, medalist,[1] writer, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the world wars.

In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940 to 1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career.

Gyula (Julius) Halász, Brassaï (pseudonym) was born on 9 September 1899 in Brassó, Kingdom of Hungary (today Brașov, Romania) to an Armenian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up speaking Hungarian and Romanian. When he was three his family lived in Paris for a year, while his father, a professor of French literature, taught at the Sorbonne.

As a young man, Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War.

He cited Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as an artistic influence.

Following WWI, his hometown of Brassó, and the rest of Transylvania, was transferred from the Kingdom of Hungary to Romania at the Treaty of Trianon. Halász left for Berlin in 1920 where he worked as a journalist for the Hungarian papers Keleti and Napkelet. He started studies at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), now Universität der Künste Berlin. There he became friends with several older Hungarian artists and writers, including

the painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór, and the writer György Bölöni, each of whom later moved to Paris and became part of the Hungarian circle.

In 1924, Halasz moved to Paris to live, where he would stay for the rest of his life. He began teaching himself the French language by reading the works of Marcel Proust. Living among the gathering of young artists in the Montparnasse quarter, he took a job as a journalist. He soon became friends with the American writer Henry Miller, and the French writers Léon-Paul Fargue and Jacques Prévert. In the late 1920s, he lived in the same hotel as Tihanyi.

Miller later played down Brassai’s claims of friendship. In 1976 he wrote of Brassai: “Fred [Perles] and I used to steer shy of him – he bored us.” Miller added that the biography Brassai had written of him was typically “padded”, “full of factual errors, full of suppositions, rumors, documents he filched which are largely false or give a false impression.”

Halász’s job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography. He first used it to supplement some of his articles for more money, but rapidly explored the city through this medium, in which he was tutored by his fellow Hungarian André Kertész. He later wrote that he used photography “to capture the beauty of streets and gardens in the rain and fog, and to capture Paris by night.” Using the name of his birthplace, Halász went by the pseudonym “Brassaï,” which means “from Brasso.”

Brassaï captured the essence of the city in his photographs, published as his first collection in the 1933 book entitled Paris de nuit (Paris by Night). His book gained great success, resulting in being called “the eye of Paris” in an essay by Henry Miller. In addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, Brassai portrayed scenes from the life of the city’s high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and the grand operas. He had been befriended by a French family who gave him access to the upper classes. Brassai photographed many of his artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, and several of the prominent writers of his time, such as Jean Genet and Henri Michaux.

Young Hungarian artists continued to arrive in Paris through the 1930s and the Hungarian

circle absorbed most of them. Kertèsz immigrated to New York City in 1936. Brassai befriended many of the new arrivals, including Ervin Marton, a nephew of Tihanyi, whom he had been friends with since 1920. Marton developed his own reputation in street photography in the 1940s and 1950s. Brassaï continued to earn a living with commercial work, also taking photographs for the U.S. magazine Harper’s Bazaar.

He was a founding member of the Rapho agency, created in Paris by Charles Rado in 1933.

Brassaï’s photographs brought him international fame. In 1948, he had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which travelled to George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.MoMA exhibited more of Brassai’s works in 1953, 1956, and 1968.[8] He was presented at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in France in 1970 (screening at the Théâtre Antique, Brassaï by Jean-Marie Drot), in 1972 (screening Brassaï si, Vominino by René Burri), and in 1974 (as guest of honour).

In 1979 Brassaï was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.

Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.

Strand’s quote encourages artists, including photographers, to embrace the idea that creativity and inspiration can be found anywhere. It emphasizes the importance of being open to the beauty and possibilities that surround us, no matter how mundane or ordinary they may initially seem. The quote suggests that the artist’s perception and ability to see and appreciate the world are crucial in finding extraordinary moments and capturing them through their chosen medium.

BRASSAÏ

Italian, 1925–2000

This was the interpretation of the oracle: today Marozia is a city where all run through leaden passages like packs of rats who tear from one another’s teeth the leftovers which fell from the teeth of the most voracious ones; but a new century is about to begin in which all the inhabitants of Marozia will fly like swallows in the summer sky, calling one another as in a game, showing off, their wings still, as they swoop, clearing the air of mosquitos and gnats.

“It is time for the century of the rat to end and the century of the swallow to begin,” the more determined said. In feet, already beneath the grim and petty rattish dominion, you could sense, among the less obvious people a pondering, the preparation of a swallowlike flight, heading for the transparent air with a deft flick of the tail, then tracing with their wings’ blade the curve of an opening horizon.

I have come back to Marozia after many years: for some time the sibyl’s prophecy is considered to have come true; the old century is dead and buried, the new is at its climax. The city has surely changed, and perhaps for the better. But the wings I have seen moving about are those of suspicious umbrellas under which heavy eyelids are lowered; there are people who believe they are flying, but it is already an achievement if they can get off the ground flapping their batlike overcoats.

It also happens that, if you move along Marozia’s compact walls, when you least expect it, you see a crack

open and a different city appear. Then, an instant later, it has already vanished. Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly. But everything must happen as if by chance, without attaching too much importance to it, without insisting that you are performing a decisive operation, remembering learly that any moment the old Marozia will return and solder its ceiling of stone, cobwebs, and mold over all heads.

Was the oracle mistaken? Not necessarily. I interpret it in this way: Marozia consists of two cities, the rat’s and the swallow’s; both change with time, but their relationship does not change; the second is the one about to free itself from the first.

HIDDEN CITIES 4

Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders’ extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it.

MARIO GIACONELLI

1 August 1925 – 25 November 2000

BIOGRAPHY

Giacomelli was born in the sea-port town of Senigallia in the Marche region of Italy into a family of modest means. Only nine when his father died, at 13, the boy left high school to work as a typesetter and spent his weekends painting and writing poetry. After the horrors of World War II, from 1953 he turned to the more immediate medium of photography and joined the Misa Group, formed that year.

Giacomelli’s technique is distinctive. After beginning with the popular and robust Comet 127 film-format viewfinder camera, made in Italy by CMF Bencini from 1948 into the 1950s, in 1954 he bought a second-hand Kobell, a larger coupled rangefinder camera for 6x9 plates and film, one of only about 400 made by Boniforti and Ballerio in Milan from about 1952, and modified it himself. He was unafraid of exploiting the double-exposure capability of its Compur shutter, as well as soft focus, camera movement and slow shutter speeds. His images are high-contrast, quite unlike the modulated full tonal range of his mentor Cavalli, and are the result of using electronic flash, from overdevelopment of his film and compensatory heavy printing so that nearly-black forms ‘float’ against a white ground. In accounting for these choices he referred to his printing-industry and graphic arts training; “For me the photographic film is like a printing plate, a lithograph, where images and emotions become stratified.” After 1986, especially in his 1992-3 series Il pittore Bastari (‘The painter Bastari’) he artificially included consciously symbolic cardboard masks and toy dogs.tailors; Capa’s mother was a successful fashion shop owner, and his father was an employee of her shop. Capa had two brothers: a younger brother, photographer Cornell Capa and an older brother, László Friedmann. Cornell moved to Paris in 1936 to join his older brother Capa, where he found an interest in photography instead of staying in the field of medicine. Not much is known of Capa’s older brother László, except that he married Angela Maria Friedmann-Csordas in 1933. He died a year later and was buried next to his father in the Kozma Utca Jewish Cemetery.

At the age of 18, Capa moved to Vienna, later relocated to Prague, and finally settled in Berlin: all cities that were centers of artistic and cultural ferment in this period. He started studies in journalism at the German Political College, but the Nazi Party instituted restrictions on Jews and banned them from colleges. Capa relocated to Paris, where he adopted the name ‘Robert Capa’ in 1934. At that time, he had already been a hobbyphotographer.

I was honest towards the people I photographed in Scanno, because it was not my intention to say anything about their social condition. I was involved neither with political issues nor with the trend of seeking misery and poverty which many photographers had towards the south of Italy at that time. In Scanno I just wanted to dream; and I dreamt.

After pre-war years dominated by a Pictorialist aesthetic promoted by the Fascist government, these artists enjoyed experimenting with form. He wandered the streets and fields of post-war Italy, inspired by the gritty Neo-Realist films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini,and influenced by the renowned Italian photographer Giuseppe Cavalli, founder of Misa, and developing a style characterized by radical compositions, bold cropping and stark contrasts.

In 1955 he was discovered in Italy by Paolo Monti, and beginning in 1963, became known outside Italy through John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Giacomelli was inspired by the literature of Cesare Pavese, Giacomo Leopardi (a native of Giacomelli’s region) and the postwar existentialist Eugenio Montale, giants of Italian writing, from which he often borrowed titles for his picture series, such as the confronting, unsentimental pictures he made (1955–57) in an old-people’s home, where his mother worked as a washer-woman; Verrà la more e avrà i tuoi occhi (‘Death will come and will have your

eyes’), taken from a Pavese poem. He wrote his own poetry and his pictures are a reflection of their visual language. Like other members of Misa, Giacomelli photographed the simple lives of the poor of southern Italy, in 1957 and 1959 visiting Scanno, a small town in the Abruzzii region which Henri Cartier-Bresson had visited only five years before to make quite different pictures.

Mario Giacomelli was an Italian photographer and photojournalist in the genre of humanism.

MARIO GIACONELLI

Italian, 1925–2000

But first, for many long years, it was uncertain whether or not the final victory would not go to the last species left to fight man’s possession of the city: the rats. From each generation of rodents that the people managed to exterminate, the few surviviors gave birth to a tougher progeny, invulnerable to traps and resistant to all poison. In the space of a few weeks, the sewers of Theodora were repopulated with hordes of spreading rats. At last, with an extreme massacre, the murderous, versatile ingenuity of mankind defeated the overweening life-force of the enemy.

The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts. To recall what had been fauna, Theodora’s library would preserve on its shelves the volumes of Buffon and Linnaeus.

Having said this, I do not wish your eyes to catch a distorted image, so I must draw your attention to an intrinsic quality of this unjust city germinating secretly inside the secret just city: and this is the possible awakening—as if in an excited opening of windows—of a later love for justice, not yet subjected to rules, capable of reassembling a city still more just than it was before it became the vessel of injustice. But if you peer deeper into this new germ of justice you can discern a tiny spot that is spreading like the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is unjust, and perhaps this is the germ of an immense metropolis....

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.

HIDDEN CITIES 5

I should not tell you of Berenice, the unjust city, which crowns with triglyphs, abaci, metopes the gears of its meat-grinding machines (the men assigned to polishing, when they raise their chins over the balustrades and contemplate the atria, stairways, porticos, feel even more imprisoned and short of stature). Instead, I should tell you of the hidden Berenice, the city of the just, handling makeshift materials in the shadowy rooms behind the shops and beneath the stairs, linking a network of wires and pipes and pulleys and pistons and counterweights that infiltrates like a climbing plant among the great cogged wheels (when they jam, a subdued ticking gives warning that a new precision mechanism is governing the city). Instead of describing to you the perfumed pools of the baths where the unjust of Berenice recline and weave their intrigues with rotund eloquence and observe with a proprietary eye the rotund flesh of the bathing odalisques, I should say to you how the just, always cautious to evade the spying sycophants and the Janizaries’ mass arrests, recognize one another by their way of speaking, especially their pronunciation of commas and parentheses; from their habits which remain austere and innocent, avoiding complicated and nervous moods; from their sober but tasty cuisine, which evokes an ancient golden age: rice and celery soup, boiled beans, fried squash flowers. From these data it is possible to deduce an image of the future Berenice, which will bring you closer to knowing the truth than any other information about the city as it is seen today. You must nevertheless bear in mind what I am about to say to you: in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right—and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its space within the double sheath of the unjust and just Berenices.

JERRY UELSMANN

June 11, 1934 – April 4, 2022

BIOGRAPHY

Jerry Norman Uelsmann was an American photographer.

As an emerging artist in the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann received international recognition for surreal, enigmatic photographs (photomontages) made with his unique method of composite printing and his dedication to revealing the deepest emotions of the human condition. Over the next six decades, his contributions to contemporary photography were firmly established with important exhibitions, prestigious awards and numerous publications. Among his awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment, Royal Photographic Society Fellowship, and Lucie Award.

Uelsmann described his creative process as a journey of discovery in the darkroom (visual research laboratory). Going against the established practice of previsualization (Ansel

Adams, Edward Weston and others), he coined a new term, post-visualization. He decided the contents of the final print after rather than before pressing the shutter button. Uelsmann constructed his dreams like a visual poet with results that often seemed emotionally more real than the factual world. By the1980s he became one of the most collected photographers in America. His work influenced generations of both analog and digital photographers. Although he admired digital photography, he remained completely dedicated to the alchemy of film photography in the black and white darkroom.

Uelsmann, a native of Detroit, Michigan, credited his parents Norman (a grocer,1904-1962) and Florence (Crossman) Uelsmann (a homemaker, 1903–1986) for encouraging his creativity. His mother saved his artworks beginning in kindergarten and continuing into college. Uelsmann’s father, whose hobby was photography, built a basement darkroom (c. 1948) to share with his two sons, Jerry and Robert.

In high school he worked as a photographer for the school newspaper and later attended Rochester Institute of Technology earning a BFA degree in 1957.

At RIT he was influenced by Minor White and Ralph Hattersley who taught craftsmanship (technical precision) along with the emotional and perceptual aspects of fine arts photography. Uelsmann appreciated White’s mystical philosophy and devotion to Zen-like meditation even when not photographing. He was particularly affected by Minor White’s belief that fine arts photographers should “strive to capture subjects for what they are and for what else they are”.

The simple act of having a camera, not a cell phone, but a camera-camera, there’s a kind of a heightened perceptional awareness that occurs. Like, I could walk from here to the highway in two minutes, but if I had a camera, that walk could take me two hours.

The abovementioned quote reflects Uelsmann’s belief that the camera grants photographers the freedom to delve into uncharted territories, both externally and internally. It suggests that through the act of photography, one can embark on a journey of discovery, pushing the boundaries of visual representation and personal introspection.

The quote captures his perspective on how the act of photographing with a camera-camera can transform one’s perception of the surroundings

and lead to a more immersive and mindful experience.

Uelsmann’s line of work often involved intricate darkroom techniques, combining multiple images to create dreamlike and surreal compositions. With this quote, he emphasizes that the camera serves as a vehicle for exploration, enabling photographers to push the limits of their creativity and capture moments and visions that might otherwise remain unseen.

Uelsmann, known for his innovative and imaginative approach to photography, has spoken about the idea of the camera as a tool for exploration and creative expression.

JERRY UELSMANN

American, 1934–2022

From these data it is possible to deduce an image of the future Berenice, which will bring you closer to knowing the truth than any other information about the city as it is seen today. You must nevertheless bear in mind what I am about to say to you: in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right—and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its space within the double sheath of the unjust and just Berenices.

Having said this, I do not wish your eyes to catch a distorted image, so I must draw your attention to an intrinsic quality of this unjust city germinating secretly inside the secret just city: and this is the possible awakening—as if in an excited opening of windows—of a later love for justice, not yet subjected to rules, capable of reassembling a city still more just than it was before it became the vessel of injustice. But if you peer deeper into this new germ of justice you can discern a tiny spot that is spreading like the mounting tendency to impose what is just through what is unjust, and perhaps this is the germ of an immense metropolis....

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.

Dear readers,

As we come to the end of this remarkable journey through the pages of our photobook, I find myself overwhelmed with a sense of awe and wonder. In the captivating realms of hidden cities, we have traversed the imagination and creativity of Italo Calvino, finding inspiration in his literary masterpiece, “Invisible Cities.” Now, as we bid farewell, I am filled with a deep appreciation for the seven artists whose extraordinary photographs have breathed life into the essence of our 9 panels assignment.

Each turn of the page has transported us to a new destination, where reality and fantasy intermingle, blurring the boundaries between what is seen and what lies beneath the surface. Just like the hidden cities in Calvino’s enchanting tales, these images have woven tales of their own, capturing the essence of places both tangible and ethereal.

Through the lens of these talented artists, we have witnessed the delicate interplay of light and shadows, the vibrant tapestry of colors, and the symphony of emotions that permeate these hidden cities. They have invited us to explore the depths of our own imagination, to question the boundaries of our perception, and to embrace the beauty of the unknown.

It is my sincerest hope that this photobook has sparked your curiosity, kindled your sense of adventure, and offered you moments of respite from the constraints of reality. In these pages, we have sought to ignite the flame of inspiration within you, urging you to embark on your own voyages of discovery and to uncover the hidden treasures that lie in wait.

Thank you, dear readers, for joining us on this extraordinary journey. May these hidden cities continue to linger in your thoughts, whispering their secrets and inspiring your own creative endeavors. May the images captured by these artists forever be etched in your memory, reminding you of the boundless beauty that exists in the world around us.

With heartfelt gratitude and warm wishes, Pho

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). Lionized in Britain and America, he was, at the time of his death, the mosttranslated contemporary Italian writer.

HIDDEN CITIES

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” So begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which “has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be,” the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.

FELTRINELLI PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

“If they are forms, they are also like signals condensing in themselves power that awaits its translation into form. And Calvino’s book is like no other know.”

“It’s hard to imagine a more authentic travelogue than Calvino’s work of fiction.”

-ITALO CALVINO

-THE NEW YORK TIMES

-LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS