Giacomo Daniele Fragapane, BRECHT, LA FOTOGRAFIA, LA GUERRA, 2015

In 1955, a fateful year for the history of photography, Bertolt Brecht’s Kriegsfibel, a book composed of verses and photographic images that the playwright had collected from illustrated magazines during his exile from Nazi Germany, was mostly ignored. the captions. For its theoretical density and its disturbing contemporary implications, it represents an editorial case increasingly frequented by scholars interested in the mechanisms of propaganda, ideological uses and the reception of war images. The Kriegsfibel unequivocally states its intentions: “this book wants to teach the art of reading images”. But in many ways he treats photography as a purely instrumental object, responding to it with a radical critique of the link between capitalism, technical reproducibility and mass society. This essay examines strategies and symptomatic places, verifying their theoretical significance in relation to a series of cases – previous, coeval and subsequent – crucial for history and photographic theory