CHAPTER 1

Mob Porn

Jeffrey T. Schnapp

The sea has a voice, which is very changeableand almost always audible. It is a voicewhich sounds like a thousand voices, andmuch has been attributed to it: patience,pain, and anger. But what is most impressiveabout it is its persistence. The sea neversleeps; by day and by night it makes itselfheard, throughout the years and decadesand centuries. In its impetus and its rage itbrings to mind the one entity which sharesthese attributes in the same degree: that is,the crowd.

—ELIAS CANETTI, Crowds and Power (1981)

THE Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d'Italia was the lavish mass distribution monthlyto which readers of Italian fascism's official daily could turn for photographs andarticles on current events much like Americans could turn to Life magazine, Russiansto Ogonek, and the Chinese to China Reconstructs. Starting in the mid-1920s,the Rivista underwent a graphic makeover; among the changes introduced was theinclusion of large-format foldouts—panoramic photographs, typically two to sixtimes wider than the standard page size. Foldouts were not uncommon in periodmagazines and, as with 1960s foldouts of Playboy bunnies, they were understoodas graphic highlights detachable for purposes of display in the home or workplace.What first drew my attention to the Rivista's foldouts, however, was the object ofdesire draped across the picture plane: teeming, seemingly infinite multitudes rallyingaround a visible or invisible leader, tightly packed into architectural settingsrepresentative of the great historical cities of the Italian peninsula. The politicalrally as source of vicarious photo- or pornographic thrill: such was the graphicprinciple that would inform the next fifteen years of the Rivista Illustrata's practice—years during which wave upon wave of innovative artists and graphic designerslaid out its pages, among them Bruno Munari, Mario Sironi, Fortunato Depero,Giò Ponti, and Xanti Schawinsky. The graphic environment shifted with eachsuccessive wave, but not the foldouts. Mass rally after mass rally unfolded in everynumber, right up to the collapse of the fascist regime.

The obvious explanation for this persistence was the foldout's propaganda value.The Rivista was more than an Italian Life magazine. It was a semiofficial partyorgan, a material conduit between the legions of citizens wedged into squaresand Italian public opinion, whose aim was to promote the image of fascist Italyas a perpetually mobilized modern nation under the ruleof a perpetually mobile modern leader. Yet the notion ofpropaganda raises more questions than it answers ("propaganda"being the label assigned to forms of mass persuasionto which one is averse). It tells one next to nothing aboutthe nature of the images placed in circulation or about thecontours of the sociopolitical imaginary that they hoped totap into and shape. Nor does it address the larger questionof where and how photographic panoramas of the massesfit into the broader stream of crowd images that arises inEuropean culture in the wake of the American and Frenchrevolutions, a topic first broached by interwar culture criticssuch as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, andby postwar art historians such as Wolfgang Kemp, but stillacutely in need of the sort of in-depth analysis provided bythe present volume and by its companion exhibition andcatalog, Revolutionary Tides. Last but not least, the invocationof a propagandistic function doesn't help one to understandhow and why panoramic representations of politicalmultitudes became intertwined with experimentaltypography and the art of photomontage and, with slightalthough significant variations, circulated not only in interwarItaly, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, andthe Soviet Union, but also in the postwar period from theChinese Cultural Revolution to the protest movements ofthe 1960s through the 1990s.

So the topic of this essay (as well as of RevolutionaryTides) is that literal specter of the Enlightenment known asthe revolutionary crowd, hovering between reason and hallucination,between the emancipatory dreams of 1789 andthe terror of 1792. It addresses the question of how revolutionarycrowds were translated into graphic elements in amedia landscape transformed by the spread of inexpensiveindustrial photolithography, the electronic transmission ofphotographic images to press agencies, the rise of live mediasuch as radio, and the emergence of visual-verbal hybridssuch as photojournalism and newsreels. The processof translation is not reducible to a single story line. Viewedfrom the standpoint of artistic technique, it is the tale of anevolving repertory of...