Bringing an uninhabited place back to life is perhaps the most authentic peculiarity of photography, a medium capable of breaking the time axis, bringing fragments of an otherwise dispersed past back into the present. Photographs, like ropes stretched between our time and a distant world, inhabit spaces like silent but living presences. If it is true that photographic images populate our homes, then those homes in turn become custodians and frames of memories that we choose to preserve and transmit. To do full justice to the photographic work, however, there must be continuity and harmony between the image and the exhibition context – or frame. The frame, as Georg Simmel observed, is never a mere aesthetic ornament, but a demarcator of meaning: it marks a boundary, separating the work from the world, and at the same time creates a threshold of meaning between inside and outside.

“Ghitta Carell. Ritratti del Novecento a Villa Necchi”, installation view, ph. Barbara Verduci 2025 © FAI
In keeping with this harmony between content and container, the FAI has chosen to make Villa Necchi Campiglio the ideal setting for the photographs of Ghitta Carell, a refined Italian portraitist who worked between the two wars. The villa, designed by Piero Portaluppi in the early 1930s and enriched over time by art collections and design solutions blending neoclassical taste and Art Deco modernity, was the epicentre of Milan’s ‘bel mondo’. In the selection of shots curated by Roberto Dulio, many images portray precisely the faces of that bourgeois elite that animated the salons of the Necchi family, fixing on photographic paper a ritual of representation and belonging. Ghitta Carell became an indispensable reference point for the Italian upper middle class thanks to her ability to turn portraits into real business cards for social success. The photographer, in fact, did not just shoot the faces of her subjects: she constructed them. Through skilful control of lighting, framing and cutting, the meticulous study of clothing and poses, and the skill of retouching the negative, Carell created figures that were not simply faithful to reality, but embodied an idealised version of what those portrayed wanted to be and show to the world.

“Ghitta Carell. Ritratti del Novecento a Villa Necchi”, installation view, ph. Barbara Verduci 2025 © FAI
Each image thus became a manifesto of the person, suspended between Hollywood suggestions and a solemn European formalism. The contrast between deep blacks and smooth whites, enhanced by the frosted effect obtained in ‘analogue post-production’, contributed to this ambiguous and powerful aesthetic, capable of sublimating individual identity and restoring it in the form of an icon. For this reason, photography is never an innocent act. It does not merely represent, it shapes, it acts on identity, it constructs a public version of it that retroactively affects the person and the way he/she is perceived by society. Never as in the inter-war years, marked by an ostentatious cult of appearance and a passion for worldliness, did photography become an instrument of self-representation and power. Concrete proof of its strength – and its dangerousness in the eyes of the regime – was the censorship imposed on Carell after the racial laws of 1938. In those years, photography was considered dangerous precisely because of its realism, capable of insinuating itself into the collective imagination and escaping the control of propaganda.

“Ghitta Carell. Ritratti del Novecento a Villa Necchi”, installation view, ph. Barbara Verduci 2025 © FAI
In this tension between past and present, the exhibition promoted by the FAI takes on added value today. Not only for the recovery of the photographic memory of Ghitta Carell and the society that revolved around her, but also for the dialogue it intends to reopen with contemporary public. The exhibition launches a call for portraits, inviting the public to report any portraits of Ghitta Carell kept in the family, by e-mailing mostraghittacarell@fondoambiente.it. The photographs found will enrich the exhibition, creating a living dialogue between private memory and collective history. In an age such as ours, in which the construction of the self passes daily through the filter of digital devices and social platforms, Carell’s work comes back to question us: how much of what we show corresponds to what we are, and how much is instead the result of an accurate mise-en-scène, conceived for an audience that, then as now, is always at the centre of our social self-portrait?
Info:
Ghitta Carell. Portraits from the 20th Century at Villa Necchi
curated by Roberto Dulio
15.05.25 – 12.10.25
Villa Necchi Campiglio
via Mozart 14, Milano
www.fondoambiente.it

Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
NO COMMENT