Works
While today von Gloeden is mainly known for his nudes, in his lifetime he was also famous for his landscape photography that helped popularize tourism to Italy. He also documented earthquake damage in Reggio Calabria & Messina in 1908. This may also explain why the locals mostly approved of his work.
The majority of von Gloeden's pictures were made before World War I, in the period 1890-1910. During the war, he had to leave Italy. After returning in 1918, he photographed very little but continued to make new prints from his voluminous archives. In total, the Baron took over 3000 images (and possibly up to 7000), which after his death were left to one of his models, Pancrazio Buciunì (also spelled Bucini; his dates sometimes given as c.1864-c.1951 but probably should be 1879-1963), known as Il Moro (or U Moru) for his North African looks. Il Moro had been von Gloeden's lover since the age of fourteen, when he had first joined the household of the Baron. In 1933, some 1000 glass negatives from von Gloeden's collection (inherited by Buciuni) and 2000 prints were confiscated by Benito Mussolini's Fascist police under the allegation that they constituted pornography and were destroyed; another 1000 negatives were destroyed in 1936, although Buciuni was tried and cleared at a court in Messina (1939–41) of disseminating pornographic images. Most of the surviving pictures (negatives and prints) are now in the Fratelli Alinari photographic archive in Florence (which in 1999 bought 878 glass negatives & 956 vintage prints formerly belonging to Buciuni to add to its existing collection of 106 prints) and further prints (which fetch hundreds of pounds at auction) are in private collections or held by public institutions such as the Civico Archivo Fotographico in Milan.
Read more about this topic: Wilhelm Von Gloeden
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalms, 107:23-4.
“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)