Page 127 - La Grande Guerra dei Carabinieri - Flavio CARBONE

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Photography and the
Photography

Great War: a cultural heritage
Great War:

he Photography of the First World War, today, has the value of a useful and in-
dispensable visual “document” to learn from and study, and it provides a clear
T idea of the facts and the protagonists of those events. The technical revolution

of photography allowed the use of such means to open narrative possibilities never ex-
plored previously and allowed many soldiers to bring home testimonies, that so far from
the front could not be understood. Photography was adopted in numerous fields such
as health care, to name but one. Hospital Health Departments, like the Rizzoli In-
stitute of Bologna or the Red Cross itself, commissioned private photographic stu-
dios to photograph physical injuries and traumas to be used for educational pur-
poses in nursing schools and by medical universities, and to document the vari-
ous phases of the artificial prosthesis construction process and the subsequent
rehabilitation phases of wounded soldiers. Even though the conflict for Italy
ended on 4 November 1918, the last photograph that definitively closed the
long visual tale of The Great War was taken on November 4, 1921 on the
Vittoriano monument in Rome, at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Since 2006, the European project Europeana.eu has been working to
systematically restore and develop World War I photographs and
documents, such as in the case of the portal www.14-18.it, within
which the artefacts were merged with the historical Museums of
the Carabinieri, the Guardia di Finanza, the Photographic Ar-
chive of the Navy, the Red Cross Volunteer Nurse Corps, the
Alessandrina Library and the Library of Modern and Con-
temporary History, and to which over time others have
been added.