The Keith de Lellis Gallery is pleased to exhibit, beginning on December 5 and running through February 8, two exhibitions devoted to photographs of childhood in the twentieth century. MANUFACTURED MOMENTS is a multi-artist exhibition of photographs (circa 1910 through 1950) created for advertising and journalism. Many of these idealized images exploit their young subjects in an effort to manipulate the viewers’ sympathies. PICCOLO MONDO (small world in Italian) is the title of our one-person exhibition of photographs made in 1958 by Renzo Tortelli. This marvelous series of photographs depicts childhood as an exciting emotion-filled free-for-all, capturing children at play with uninhibited abandon in an Italian nursery school.

MANUFACTURED MOMENTS
This exhibition features more than 30 images and includes the work of Gordon Coster, Ralph Bartholomew, Weegee, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Russell Lee, Lewis Hine, Dudley Glanfield, Lejaren Hillier and other twentieth century photographers. On exhibit are both highly contrived images that were intended as photo-illustrations in advertising, as well as slice-of-life photojournalism created for the masses. The juxtaposition of similar and disparate photographs reveals the ironies in the dreams and realities of modern life. The inherent message is intended to sell goods to the consumer, further a socio-political cause or present an idealized view of a contented life.

A classic Lewis Hine photograph, ca. 1910, of a young boy working in a New England cotton mill is a cruder version of Dudley Glanfield’s slightly later and more polished image of a young girl in a mill in Bolton, England. Hine’s image was created as a document to advocate laws protecting children against exploitation in the workplace, while Glanfield’s image was intended to promote the virtues of an English cotton mill. It seems unlikely that when Glanfield made his advertising photograph in the mid-1920s, he would have been aware of Lewis Hine’s pictures of the same subject.

Gordon Coster’s photographic versatility shines through in this exhibition. Coster’s career in the early to mid-1930s was devoted to creating advertising photographs to sell American products like Quaker Oats or household goods for Marshall Fields department store in Chicago. Gordon Coster was typical of photographers of his generation who made the nexus from advertising to journalism; his contemporaries Margaret Bourke-White and Edward Steichen also made this transition. An example of the comparison between Coster’s advertising work and his work in journalism is a pair of pictures both dealing with poverty and hunger. In his studio photograph created as a touching piece of propaganda, a sad, hungry young child holds an empty dinner plate. As a journalist, he photographed the same despair, documenting shivering grade-school children in Chicago standing on a picket line with signs screaming “WE WANT MILK.”

A Russell Lee photograph, made for the Farm Security Administration, shows a young boy whose family was devastated by western drought conditions bravely living in the out-of-doors. In stark contrast to Lee’s picture of 1930’s poverty in America is fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s portrait of a happy family playing games in their cozy living room, taken for “Harper’s Bazaar” Magazine in the same period.

For some, the first half of the twentieth century was a time of vast social reform and economic struggle, while for others a time of prosperity. The pictures in this exhibit illustrate the varying roles photography played in the social dreams and realities of this era.

PICCOLO MONDO
In this extraordinary series of images, photographer Renzo Tortelli captures a variety of intense emotions and gestures of active toddlers in an Italian nursery school. These unposed pictures record Tortelli’s spontaneous observations and are fascinating for the uninhibited and generous display of feelings that the children exhibit. With the click of his camera, Tortelli freezes an abstract playroom moment of frenzied intensity. His images so effectively capture his subject that you can almost hear the children’s squeals of laughter.

Renzo Tortelli is from a small city on the Adriatic Coast of Italy. This region produced some of Italy’s most influential photographers of the period, Mario Giacomelli and Giuseppe Cavalli. Tortelli’s body of work fits neatly into the relevant neo-realist style of Italy’s postwar generation of artists, photographers and filmmakers. In this period, Italy was in step with photographers throughout the world whose concerns centered on the human condition and the family of man. Tortelli’s joyful life-affirming pictures are the happy flipside to the dark and depressing images made by Mario Giacomelli that depict the ravages of old age in an Italian nursing home.

This is Renzo Tortelli’s first exhibition outside of Italy and the first time this series has been the subject of a one-man show. Tortelli’s unique pictures, with all their candid honesty, reveal the uncanny ability of this artist to get it right with his quick and focused lens. Some of history’s greatest photographers, Lewis Carroll, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt and Sally Mann, to name a few, have forged their reputations on their unforgettable images of childhood.