In recent years, Italian Studies has demonstrated a growing interest towards photography and its relations to society and culture in Italy. Enlightening encounters makes a valuable contribution to this area of scholarship and begins to fill the gap in the lack of critical studies on photography and Italian literary practices. Divided into four sections, the book consists of eleven chapters that investigate literary responses to photography in the nineteenth century and in the decades spanning from the 1950s to the present day. With the exception of the photography historian Marco Andreani, all contributors are literary scholars. Their essays examine a variety of authors and literary genres including fiction, autobiography, and the photo-text.

The first section of the book focuses on photography’s aesthetic and thematic impact on literature. Maria Grazia Lolla offers an extremely interesting reading of the links between photography and literature in the late nineteenth century, a time in which human agency appeared to be seriously compromised by the emerging social sciences (statistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology). Lolla highlights the significant concurrence between the social sciences’ focus on ‘invisible’ forces beyond human control as determinant agents shaping history and society, and the lure of photography among writers and scientists as a representation free from human mediation. Discussing visibility and visuality in the work of Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati, Pasquale Verdicchio argues that photography played a fundamental role in the development of a visual consciousness within Italian literature. Marina Spunta analyses Viaggio in un paesaggio terrestre (2006), a photo-text by photographer Vittore Fossati and writer Giorgio Messori. She convincingly argues that the book offers a crucial example of intermediality in contemporary landscape representation. Words and photographs work together with the aim of presenting the authors’ drive towards a place of belonging, while at the same time addressing their postmodern sense of displacement.

The second section focuses on the way writers have used photography’s perpetual fluctuation between documentary and fiction, between reality and imagination. Sarah A. Carey’s contribution on Vittorio Imbriani’s Merope IV (1867) shows how the non-objective dimension of photography is at the base of the novel’s narrative structure, appearing as a visual metaphor for writing. Photography’s status as both fact and fiction is also at the centre of Nancy Pedri’s essay on Erri De Luca’s Non ora non qui (1989). Pedri argues that De Luca does not use photography for the hic et nunc (here and now) it represents, but for the reality that the observer projects onto it, thereby blurring the lines between past, present and future.

Photography’s narrative dimension as it relates to the medium’s indexicality is the focus of the third section. Again, the discussion revolves primarily around photography’s dual uses as a documentary and fictional medium. Marco Andreani opens the section with an essay on Luigi Crocenzi’s photographic novel Un seminarista (1954-5) and Mario Giacomelli’s photographic series Io non ho mani che mi accarezzano il volto (1961-63). Taking the resistance that photography as a means of artistic expression encountered in Italy within highbrow cultural circles as a starting point for his discussion, Andreani argues for Crocenzi’s fundamental role as a mediator and facilitator of the encounters between photography and literature that took place during the 1950s and 1960s through figures such as Giacomelli, Mulas, Vittorini, Zavattini, Sereni, and Fortini. Donata Panizza’s contribution on Antonio Tabucchi’s Notturno indiano (1984) and Daniele Del Giudice’s Lo stadio di Wimbledon (1983) is focused on the two writers’ rejection of photography, a medium that they both deem incapable of producing a rigorous representation of reality. The notion of photography as a medium centered on imagination, fiction, and allegory rather than a faithful reproduction of reality is at the core of Stefano Ajello’s essay on Lalla Romano’s Nuovo romanzo di figure (1997) and Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia (1953).

The book’s last section is dedicated to the relationship between photography, writing, and power. In her essay on Alberto Moravia’s L’uomo che guarda (1985), Maria Martino uses an inter-semiotic approach to discuss the presence in the novel of a Mallarmé poem and of a fictive photograph inspired by Manet’s Olympia. Martino argues that photographic practice appears in Moravia’s text as a translative process of scopophilia: a process that permeates the novel as a whole. Photography’s inability to offer a depiction of reality that goes beyond the surface of things, particularly in the representation of celebrity, is at the core of Sarah Patricia Hill’s chapter on Andrea De Carlo’s Treno di panna (1981). Looking at photographs less as bearers of forms of power projected onto them than as agents of self-empowerment, Giorgia Alù analyses the work of Albanian migrant writer and photographer Ornela Vorspi. Alù’s essay explores issues of female identity and dislocation, an area scarcely investigated within Italian Studies, from the perspective of photography’s agency, as an effective tool for resistance and re-appropriation.

Overall, the book does not fully reflect the editors’ claim for interdisciplinarity, and would have certainly benefited from the inclusion of more scholars coming from disciplines outside literary theory. Also, the literature on photography upon which the authors rely is not always up-to-date. Indeed, the discussion primarily revolves on photography’s indexicality, its ambivalent status between fact and fiction, and its being a vehicle of power and dominant ideologies. No reference is made to the ‘material turn’ in recent historiography of photography which, contrary to both modernist and postmodernist approaches to medium, considers photographs no longer exclusively as visual phenomena, but rather as material objects with their own agency and social lives. Despite these observations, Enlightening Encounters is an important and stimulating contribution on the interfaces between photography and literature in Italy that paves the way for further discussion and research.