Nowadays, John Ruskin is considered to be the first photograph collector. It was precisely in Italy that he started this adventure in the second half of the 1940s , mainly in Venice, where he spent long periods studying art and architecture.

Ruskin envisaged daguerreotype as a new way to analize reality; those “little jems”, in fact – that’s how Ruskin used to call daguerreotype images obtained on silver-coated copper plates –faithfully reproduced even the most mysterious details that would otherwise have remained indecipherable, impossible to be as accurately transcribed by even the most skilled draftsman.

This early collecting of photographs, where images were only seen as a precise documentation of reality, soon developed into a more intimate and abstract pleasure: photographs began to be collected for the sake of their beauty, and not only for their recording function.

A lot of art experts – among whom Corrado Ricci, Iginio Supino, Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi and perhaps even Vittorio Sgarbi in Italy - still value photographs for their iconographical recording power, by means of which they can easily study many works of art that are scattered in museums all over the world. As Corrado Ricci enthusiastically osbserved in 1905, photographs preserve forms that would otherwise be forgotten.

The beauty of a photograph, its charm as artistic object which is often a true work of art, goes far beyond the obvious and nonetheless important quality of visual image; thanks to its chiaroscuro effects, cromatic nuances, graphical structure up to its full-bodied surface, it also stimulates visual and mysterious emotions, similar to those aroused by poetry.

Collecting photographs means understanding their esthetic value as well as their historical, documentary and technological importance, just like for any other form of decorative art.

A philological study of photography’s social, esthetical and technical history was made possible by collectors such as Joseph Maria Eder, Raimond Lécuyer, Helmut Gernsheim, André Jammes. They first started as photograph collectors, but later produced some major studies on what can be considered half art and half science. Moreover, their passionate efforts that were not merely speculative nor self-centered, aimed instead at safeguarding a fundamental product of our times.

A special thank to Professor Italo Zannier (Venice), for the reading of the collection; to Doctor Silvia Berselli (Milan), for the restauration work and the attibution of the techniques; to Alberto Petrò for the catalogue work and the research of the linked web sites.