Italia 1945/1948

Fifty black-and-white photographs by Luigi Comencini, taken in the years just before he became one of Italy's leading film directors, capture a country still absorbing the shock of war and unsure of what would come next.

Shot between 1945 and 1948, the pictures show navvies at work, farmers passing through town, an amateur painter at his easel, children playing or simply looking back at the lens: the suspended atmosphere of a nation in which nothing would be as it was, but the future was not yet imaginable. Comencini took them in the same Milanese years in which, with Alberto Lattuada, he helped found the Cineteca Italiana, the country's first film archive. Humboldt Books published the find in its Time Travel series to mark the centenary of his birth, a 92-page softcover with French flaps and an inserted booklet, bilingual in Italian and English, with an introduction by Cristina Comencini and essays by Giovanna Calvenzi, Giorgio Gosetti, and Mario Sesti.

Comencini went on to direct some of postwar Italian cinema's most enduring films, among them Bread, Love and Dreams, Everybody Go Home, and The Scientific Cardplayer. This early photographic work reveals the same attentive, unsentimental eye for ordinary life that his later films would turn on Italian family and society.