Sanford Roth
with a foreword by
Kenneth Baker
text by Beulah Roth

  ITALY ’50s: Photographs by Sanford Roth
       
 

ITALY ’50s
Photography
144 pages
Paper, $24.95
0-916515-72-9
World

  With a gifted eye for the unusual moment, sometimes poignant, sometimes comic, Roth details Italy in the fifties.

His knowing camera captures both the quirkily mundane — nuns wearing newspaper hats, fiacre horses wearing straw hats — and the grim realities of postwar politics — a walkway tiled with the word Duce or walls scrawled with anti­American graffiti. He is quick to catch, as well, film directors and actors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti in unposed moments.

Roth also compiled a portrait of Italian artists, from Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgo Morandi to Carlo Carrá and Gino Severini, making this book an important contribution to the history of art. A foreword by San Francisco art critic Kenneth Baker identifies these artists as the ones who brought Italian art out of classicism and into the modern era in the Futurist, Metaphysical, and postwar movements. The older generation struggled to define their art, caught between an anachronistic tradition and war-torn modernity. For all the inner turbulence they may have felt, Roth's portraits capture them in a moment of calm before the onslaught of innovation in the sixties.

       
       
      SANFORD ROTH was born in 1906 and grew up in Brooklyn. A job managing chain stores brought him to Los Angeles in the 1930s, where he met and married Beulah Spigelgass. In 1946 he quit his job to pursue his real passion — photography — and the Roths moved to Paris. His photographs of that time and place are collected in Paris in the Fifties (Mercury House, 1988). Soon Sandy became a photojournalist to the film industry, and the Roths traveled between Hollywood, Europe, and other locations around the globe. They shared a passion for cats, shopping, clothes, Paris, Rome, flea markets, Roman marbles, contemporary paintings, and people. Roth’s photographs appeared in Life, Look, Paris Match, Elle, People, Harper's Bazaar, and Oggi. His informal portraits of celebrities in the worlds of film, art, literature, and music are collected in Portraits of the Fifties (Mercury House, 1987). Sanford Roth died in Rome in 1962; Beulah Roth died in 1990.

KENNETH BAKER is art critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, a contributing editor to Artforum magazine, and the author of Minimalism: Art of Circumstance (Abbeville Press, 1989).