Carlo Mollino: Photographs 1956-1962

This portfolio gathers photographs Carlo Mollino made in secret between 1956 and 1962, private pictures the architect and designer never showed in his lifetime and that surfaced only after his death.

Mollino set up a private apartment in Turin purely as a photography studio and photographed women there with a Leica on color negative film, then painted and retouched the negatives and prints themselves, reshaping bodies and altering color, a practice he had already theorized in his own treatise, "Il Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura" (Message from the Darkroom). The pictures in this book stop just before Mollino moved on to the Polaroid work he made through the rest of the 1960s. Published in 2006 by Museo Casa Mollino, the institution built around Mollino's reconstructed Turin apartment, the book was edited by Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari. The brothers acquired and preserve Mollino's archive and have shepherded most of the posthumous publications of his photographic work.

Mollino (1905-1973) was one of the most singular figures in twentieth-century Italian design: an architect, furniture and interior designer, racing driver, and aviator best known for buildings such as the Teatro Regio in Turin and for furniture now held in major design collections. His photography, unknown until the Ferraris began publishing it in the 1990s, revealed a parallel, obsessive private practice. That practice has since reshaped his critical reputation as much as his built work.