Neorealism

In photography, Neorealism refers to a loosely defined current of Italian image-making that combines documentary realism with an ethical commitment to social renewal. As a consciously named tendency it crystallizes in the final years of the Second World War as a reaction against fascist propaganda, offering a collective artistic response to destruction, poverty, and the struggle to forge a new national identity. Historians often frame the body of work associated with photographic Neorealism within a broader core period from about 1932 to 1960, to account for earlier and later images that share the same outlook. It forms part of a wider neorealist current that spans cinema, literature, theater, and music. Neorealist photographers adopt an attitude of close involvement with everyday life, especially among communities marginalized under fascism, using the camera to reveal social realities in streets, villages, and industrial centers. Their practice frequently intersects with ethnographic investigation, recording local customs and intimate gestures as a way of mapping everyday life across diverse Italian communities.

Neorealist photographs typically favor black-and-white, on-location shooting, handheld cameras, and natural light, rejecting studio staging and decorative effects. The images aim to be beautiful yet raw, stressing unvarnished reality and harsh truths while maintaining a tone of tenderness and compassion. They seek to represent reality without filters or rhetoric while preserving strong subjective inflections in framing and sequencing. Common subjects include rural and urban poverty, the peasant south, industrial working-class neighborhoods, migration from south to north, and, very prominently, children as figures of vulnerability and hope. Work is often organized into photo-stories or picture essays, sometimes conceived as a "still movie on printed paper," and circulates through illustrated magazines, photobooks, and exhibitions.

Debates around Neorealism in photography frequently concern its boundaries, its relation to cinema, and its balance of art and document. The tradition grows out of documentary practice and Social Realism, including American social photography and Farm Security Administration work, and overlaps with Humanist Photography and Straight Photography. Critics also connect it to Poetic Realism as a precursor and to later tendencies such as Film Noir, Cinéma Vérité, and various forms of Lyrical Realism. Neorealism established an aesthetic paradigm that influenced subsequent movements and continues to inform the work of many contemporary artists.