Carlo Mollino: Polaroids

Polaroids gathers the private photographic practice Carlo Mollino kept almost entirely to himself: hundreds of Polaroid portraits of women, staged in his own Turin apartment and never intended for public view.

From around 1960 until his death in 1973, Mollino invited dancers and other women to late-night sessions in his apartment, art-directing each shot against elaborate backdrops, in costumes, wigs, and accessories he selected himself, then hand-finishing the resulting Polaroids with a fine brush to sharpen his idealized image of the female form. Of some 1,200 photographs found only after his death, this volume reproduces roughly 400, with texts by Fulvio Ferrari, Napoleone Ferrari, and Silvio Curto situating the work within Mollino's larger practice; James Crump contributes a foreword to Damiani's 2014 edition, a reissue of the volume first published in 2002.

Mollino (1905-1973) trained as an engineer before becoming one of mid-century Italy's most idiosyncratic architects and designers, equally known for the Turin buildings and furniture that made his reputation and for restless private interests in skiing, aviation, and photography — subjects he treated with the same obsessive control as his design work. Polaroids joins the library's other Mollino holdings as the most intimate and long-hidden part of that record.