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Photographs: ITALIAN ICONS

Wednesday 18 June 2025, 04:00 PM • Milan

92

Federico Vender

(1901 - 1998)

Il cappello nero, 1942

Artist's Resale Right

Estimate

€ 500 - 800

Sold

€ 387

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

Gelatin silver print on coated paper, printed later
cm 17,8 x 24 (cm 17 x 21,2 picture) | 7 x 9.4 in. (6.7 x 8.3 in. picture)
Signed, titled and dated in black ink with Provincia Autonoma di Trento stamp on the verso

Literature

Federico Vender fotografo, Dragoni edizioni, Brescia, 1991, cover
Federico Vender (Schio, Vicenza 1901 - Arco, Trento 1999) joined the Circolo Fotografico Milanese in the 1930s, of which he was director until after the war, achieving success and recognition in Paris and New York. In his travels with the Plaubel Makina 6x9 in Italy and abroad he developed his own dry, sunny style, always of the highest formal quality. In 1947 he is one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the La Bussola Group while at the same time he is influenced by the suggestions of neorealism. He worked on fashion for Ferrania to later be hired by the publishers Rizzoli and Delduca as a photo story photographer. 

Vender's cultural points of reference are numerous and range from German photography of the 1920s to pictorialism with an eye turned, albeit in a non-dogmatic way, to that idea inspired by the Crucian aesthetic of the accurate high key print dominated by bright tones. This is evident in the portrait of the woman with the black hat, an image so important that it appeared on the cover of the monograph “Federico Vender fotografo” published in 1991 by the Brescian editor Dragoni. In the careful setting of the face that occupies the central part, finding in the dress and the hat's flaps the ideal frame, one finds the compositional features present in the top-down, diagonal shot of St. Mark's Square. The orderly geometries of the spaces allow the dark areas placed in the upper left and lower right to converse with the lighter central one punctuated by the stretching shadows of the walkers and those of the pigeons that look like elements of a strange punctuation.  

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