Carlo Molino, Polaroids

Carlo Mollino

Polaroids

Arena Editions, première édition, September 2002

Hardcover, 220 pages, English, 10.8 x 8.8 x 1.2 inches
Essays by Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari
ISBN-10: 189204160X
ISBN-13: 978-1892041609

From the publisher:

"Less well known but perhaps even more compelling are Mollino's erotic Polaroid photographs of the prostitutes and women of Torino, made beginning in the 1960s. Created in the confines of Casa Mollino, the magically surreal and mystical studio in Turin that Mollino occupied during the last fourteen years of his life, the erotic Polaroids suggest an exercise in obsession and voyeurism. Mollino incessantly controlled every aspect of these remarkable images, from choosing the clothing and fine lingerie the women wore to the precise posing and staging, often photographing the women against curtain drops or tiled floors, with objects he owned or on furniture he designed. In the Polaroids published here, culled from over 1,500 extant examples, female beauty is isolated, taken apart, and put back together."
Fulvio Ferrari and Napoleone Ferrari are the foremost experts on Carlo Mollino. Together they manage the Casa Mollino in Turin, Mollino's last studio and the repository of his photographs, objects, and other important materials.

One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was renowned both for his sleek, ultramodern furniture design and architecture and for his refined hedonism; he was a drug addict who raced cars and flew his own plane. Sometime around 1960, Mollino began to seek out women, mostly prostitutes, in his native Turin, bringing them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions, where they posed for Polaroid photographs, against backgrounds that he designed. The pictures remained a secret between Mollino and his subjects until after his death, in 1973, when some two thousand were found. This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women.
The New Yorker