Travel Photography in the Visual Imagery of Eugene Berman

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of travel photography in Eugene Berman’s work from the 1950s onward, based on an initial survey of his collection at the American Academy in Rome. After his first recourse to the camera during his 1947 trip to Mexico, Berman photographed over the years various historic cities and archaeological sites mainly in Italy, the original source of inspiration for his art, where he settled permanently in 1957. In addition to highlighting some correspondences with the graphic and pictorial work, the essay outlines the making of a kind of visual topographical atlas, Warburg inspired, the arrangement of photographs in the album device, and their remediation in art creation. The transposition and montage of photographic sources into imaginary views, the dialectic between fidelity to the real and creative inventio, as well as the short-circuit between different times and places that seeps out of his works make Berman the singular forerunner of a postmodern sensibility, while the use of the reproduced image assumes great interest today from the perspective of Visual Studies.