Fotografia Wulz English text

INTRODUCTION

Photography Wulz offers a more than century-long journey into the history of Trieste through the lens of a photographic atelier, retracing the stages that placed it at the center of the international scene in its economic, urban and architectural development. Since the second half of the 19th century, Giuseppe, Carlo, Wanda and Marion Wulz have continuously illustrated the social and cultural changes in the city with their photographs and life stories, with special attention to the world of women and through creativity and artistic experimentation. The journey begins by leafing through the photo album of a family that represents the history of Trieste.

THE FAMILY ALBUM

Palazzo Hierschel, Corso 19 and then Corso Italia 9 in Trieste, hosted three generations of professional Italian photographers who also spent their existences there and intertwined bonds of art and life.
From 1891 to its closure in 1981, Giuseppe, Carlo, Wanda and Marion lived and worked in the rooms, spaces of the workshop, on the terrace and in the veranda penthouse of the palace overlooking the city of Trieste. Previously, starting in 1875, Giuseppe Wulz had had his studio, also on the Corso, ‘opposite the Aquila Black Eagle’ (as the advertising marks of the Wulz atelier read in the historic carte de visits produced to make themselves known). The Wulz’s connection to Trieste is total, just as total is the bond they established with photographic practice, both the one d’atelier as well as the one made to construct their private family album.
Photography Wulz is a tribute to their family album, between the city and the atelier.

THE OUTCOMES

Giuseppe Wulz learns the craft as a photographer at the Engel studio, until a fire destroys it in 1868. Wulz partnered with Luigi Boccalini and brought with him to the new studio of Engel’s ‘pupils’ some fifty ‘carte de visite’ that he later used as specimens. Samples of single portraits and groups, full-length or half-length, with the sitters sitting or standing, leaning against chairs, balustrades or furniture. In the adult groups there is a focus on hierarchies in positions, with compositions of male and female standing and sitting.

POINT OF VIEW

When in 1874 Giuseppe Wulz decided at the age of thirty-one to take up the profession of photography independently and broke away from his partner and best man Luigi Boccalini, he is quite clear in the request he makes to the relevant authorities that he will ‘practice the photographic industry especially the branch of landscapes.’ From the beginning, in fact, he proposes to his potential clients urban views that, from above, photograph the development of the growing city in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

THE POPULARS

One of the first jobs Giuseppe Wulz decided to undertake after his separation from Boccalini has an ethnographic slant. Giuseppe has Servolan ‘pagnigole’ (bread sellers), girls and boys from Karst, come to his studio, dressed in traditional Slovenian clothes, which are also familiar to him because his wife Anna Sajè is Slovenian. Wulz prints many carte de visite of ‘commoners’ because he assumes a possibility of selling them to tourists as well, as is the case in cities included in Grand Tour itineraries.

MIRAMARE AND MUSEO REVOLTELLA

Joseph Wulz obtained permission on June 12, 1874, and sets his sights on an iconic place in the city, Miramar Castle, as it was called at the time, with its park. He is convinced that a good number of Triestines and outsiders can buy his photographs. At the same time he realizes, also thanks to good relations with Conservator Augusto Tominz, a photographic campaign within the Revoltella Museum, which had been inaugurated in 1872.

THE TRIESTINE SOCIETY

In the early twentieth century, emerging social groups in Trieste felt the need for self-representation.

They turned to the Wulz the associative realities of crafts, shopkeepers and of other professions, including women. Even the workers, in a city that is experiencing intense industrial development, are portrayed outside the factories or while at work.

THE SHIPS

Steamships are systematically photographed by Joseph Wulz. By September 1885 he had photographed seventy-nine ‘steamers’ on behalf of Austrian Lloyd, which would celebrate its 50th anniversary the following year. Wulz was also called upon to photograph the various of the vessels and sometimes the crews as well.

THE GYMNASTICS SOCIETY OF TRIESTE

The Trieste Gymnastics Society chooses the Wulz studio to celebrate its successes in local, national and international competitions, attested by the numerous medals on the chests of its uniformed athletes, and to provide a memento to its members and students. In the early twentieth century, the groups of marchers, gymnasts and gymnasts, who have also been in the Trieste sports world, are portrayed in the gymnasium, in front of the backdrop brought from the studio, or in the adjoining garden, with the flag in the center and master Aldo Boiti, who always wears a hat with a long pen.

HORSES, ANTONIO WULZ’S PASSION

Antonio combines his entrepreneurial skills with sporting ones. He owns several horses over time that excel at Montebello and also at other racetracks. ‘Gamma’, ‘Arian’, ‘Styx’, ‘Cypresse’, ‘Agnes’, ‘Ada Watson’ and ‘Etus’ populate between 1908 and 1909 the pages of the equestrian chronicles, always winning or placing in the top positions. It is he himself leading them on the sulky to the finish line at racetracks.

CULTURE, ENTERTAINMENT AND ART

Carlo Wulz, having long since outgrown the techniques used in the period which is usually defined as ‘pictorialist,’ in the 1920s he elaborated a style entirely personal, very far from the conventionality of his early works, which were in continuity with those of his father Joseph.
Of great impact are, in particular, the portraits that Carlo devotes to the exponents who are part of the network of relationships built by the Wulz in the world of culture, entertainment and art.

CARLO WULZ’S EXHIBITIONS

Carlo Wulz wins in 1925 the Grand Prize Diploma at the ‘First Exhibition of Photographic Art’ in the Villa Reale Di Monza with a portrait Of the painter Edmondo (Eddy) Passauro. In 1926 and 1927 he participated in the ‘Salon International d’Art Photographique’ in Paris with ‘Spagnola’ (Olga Reich) and with a portrait of the painter Rietti. Also in 1927, with another ‘Spagnola’ (his daughter Wanda) he was again in Monza. In the last period of his life he is present at the ‘International Annual Exhibition’ of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and at the exhibitions of the Camera Clubs of New York and Chicago.

MAY 1 TO JUNE 12, 1945

These are the days of the occupation of Trieste by the IX Corpus of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. Marion Wulz begins photographing May 1 from the terrace of the studio. Finally, on June 12, she photographs the event that, in the aftermath of the signing of an an international agreement, celebrates the arrival of Anglo-American troops replacing the Yugoslav army. Marion continues this activity on the occasion of events that pass through the Corso in the subsequent years.

THE EPILOGUE

We are at the epilogue of a one hundred and fifty year long story. On August 3, 1993, Maria Antonia, better known as Marion Wulz, died. Photographer, but also custodian of a heritage that without her would have been dispersed and that, instead, today is available to all. We have chosen to offer you from her voice a few excerpts in which she recounts episodes from the history of her life and that of her family, associated with some photographs and a musical commentary. To remember her there is the portrait that her teacher, the painter Edmondo (Eddy) Passauro had made of her when she was a young girl and the two photographs by George Tatge that depict her, elderly, in the house in Corso Italia, no longer in its years of splendor, on the stairs and in front of the terrace of a now abandoned studio.

FOCUS

– Joseph Wulz, mindful of the engraving by Nicolas Marie Josef Chapuy that illustrated the Barcola viaduct some 20 years earlier, within a volume on the Southern Railway, published by the literary-artistic section of the Austrian Lloyd, adopted the same point of view and framing.

With his camera he also gives us the opportunity to discover the Squero San Bortolo.

– The carte de visite, patented in Paris in 1854 by Eugène Disdéri, supplanted the miniature and became a fashion throughout the world. It gives a wider public the opportunity to keep photographic portraits of small size (6×9 centimeters), similar to business cards, glued on a card and obtained from a single negative on a glass plate from which multiple exposures were obtained, with a camera that could have from four to eight lenses. A democratization of portraiture which was previously the prerogative of the aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie.

– Joseph Wulz also uses stereoscopic photography, a pair of images that gives the impression of three-dimensionality when viewed with a device consisting of two eyepieces, such as the Brewster stereoscope, an instrument also found in many Trieste families

– Those who go to be portrayed get on the photographer’s stage and have a backdrop behind them, like an actor in the theater. Even in the Wulz studio there was one, and when Joseph or Charles went to away clients they often took a second, ‘portable’ one with them. The groups on the one hand proudly carry, as is tradition, their working tools but, on the other hand, accept the rules of composition proposed by the author who determines the positions and hierarchies of the subjects in the space.

– There were a number of cycling groups in Trieste. Already his father Giuseppe had photographed in the 1980s, in his studio on Corso 9, a young man on a ‘penny forthing’ velocipede, secured with a taut wire to prevent falls disguised by a suitable retouching, now Carlo Wulz portrays in 1903 a group of cyclists with bicycles equipped with tires.

– According to Robert Capa ‘when your photographs are not good enough, you are not close enough’. Marion Wulz, on May 2, 1945 must have thought the same thing when she took to the streets to photograph more closely those involved in the occupation of the city by the IX Corpus of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia.

WANDA AND MARION WULZ, PHOTOGRAPHERS AND SISTERS

Wanda and Marion were the last descendants of the Wulz family to devote themselves to photography: from 1928, with the death of their father Charles, they ran the Trieste atelier until its closure in 1981. In addition to the atelier and the profession of photography, the Wulz sisters also inherited a passion for a constant practice of family album portraiture that had already seen them, as children, protagonists of Carlo’s lens. As they grew up, the two sisters began to collaborate more and more with their father in the realization of this mnemonic exercise that became collective and shared: in the portraits

Wanda and Marion appear not only as passive models, but as involved and aware women. Left alone, the mutual portraits and self-portraits they made became forms of imaginary escapism and a way of expressing desires and needs for mutual identity mirroring.

ANITA PITTONI AND THE WULZ

In 1928, the young Trieste designer friend of Wanda and Marion, Anita Pittoni, moved to live for a few years in the Wulz atelier.

Thus began between the three women a season of artistic, human and professional collaboration that produced its best results during the 1930s. From that coterie of friends and artists, in fact, began an experimental and multidisciplinary activity, in which experiences in photography, art, music, dance, fashion and design were interwoven in an unprecedented way. The clothes designed by Pittoni were worn by herself and the Wulz sisters, during sessions in which they photographed each other, dancing and mixing languages and territories of creativity. From these photographic performances remain, in addition to the photographs, playbills and invitations in which they planned variety nights and shows in which they shared nonconformist and provocative ideas.

DANCE BODY PERFORMANCE

In the 1920s and 1930s, the theme of body free body of women had a very wide resonance through the practice of dance and gymnastics. Among others, it was promoted by Valentine de Saint-Point, author of the Futurist Woman’s Manifesto of 1912, and Giannina Censi, who also interpreted her aerodances at the National Exhibition of Futurist Photography in Trieste of 1932, and whose postures were published in 1933 in the famous essay on the Physical Culture of Women. Art and photography made, in fact, a decisive contribution to the demands for the liberation of women’s bodies and gestures, favoring their visual concretization.

The Wulz sisters reserved great attention for the bodies of ballerinas and dancers, whom they portrayed several times as the famous Olga Reich, and many were the images they dedicated to Etta Paulin and her School of Acrobatics, immortalizing women’s bodies in gymnastic and athletic poses.

MODERN WOMEN

Not only in private and album photos family albums, but also in the more strictly professional photographic activity of the Studio Wulz, sisters Wanda and Marion showed a predilection for female portraiture and a special ability to bring out the image of a modern woman, as emancipated and independent as, in fact, they themselves were. As modern women, Wanda and Marion Wulz used photography as a tool capable of conveying a ‘political project’ that, from an individual and private perspective, became the interpreter of shared historical and social needs.

Extensive is the series of portraits of the charming and strong-willed Mrs. Bosutti, important the presences of women artists, poets, writers and actresses photographed, among them Leonor Fini, Paola Borboni, Pia Rimini, Ketty Daneo, up to Irene Camber, Olympic fencing champion in 1952.

THE FUTURIST EXPERIENCE

Between April 1 and 17, 1932, Wanda Wulz was invited to participate, the only woman photographer included in the Italian movement, at the National Exhibition of Futurist Photography in Trieste. In the exhibition catalog she was listed as the author of six photographs: Futurist Breakfast, Portrait, Jazz-band, Me + Cat, Exercise, Wunder-Bar.

And if the superimposition of two negatives in Io + cat is today a global icon, and for this Wanda a world-renowned artist, at a deeper look all six futurist experiments show that Wanda entered the groove of avant-garde research bringing with her absolutely personal and unprecedented instances and experiences. Wanda, but Marion’s presence is constant and fundamental, seemed to want to provide a gendered perspective on the possibilities offered by the photographic medium, expanding them to a different point of view, to a different observation of the world.