Giovanni Crupi (1861–1925) was an Italian photographer of

landscapes A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...

, active in

Taormina Taormina ( , , also , ; ) is a ''comune'' (municipality) in the Metropolitan City of Messina, on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. Taormina has been a tourist destination since the 19th century. Its beaches on the Ionian Sea, incl ...

and

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

(in Heliopolis).

Biography

Giovanni Crupi was originally an amateur photographer. It became his profession in 1885. He was a friend and colleague of

Wilhelm von Gloeden Wilhelm Iwan Friederich August von Gloeden (September 16, 1856 – February 16, 1931), commonly known as Baron von Gloeden, was a German photographer who worked mainly in Italy. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys ...

. Pasquale Verdicchio in his book ''Looters, Photographers, and Thieves: Aspects of Italian Photographic Culture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries'' states that von Gloeden learned the basics of photography from Crupi, in whose studio he became an apprentice. Von Gloeden himself stated in 1898 in a memoir that he learned the rudiments of photographic art from the Giuseppe Bruno. In the field of landscape photography, the two friends and colleagues seem to have influenced one another. , small number of male nudes produced by Crupi, set in archaeological sites in Syracuse, are attributed to the influence of Gloeden. A small number of images carry the stamp of both Gloeden and Crupi. However, these images are stylistically quite different from what Crupi produced, so it is possible that the double stamp is due to the fact that Crupi acted as Gloeden's distributor: there are photos by Gloeden that show the second stamp of Brogi or Angelo Pedo, who we know with certainty to have been a distributor for third parties. The artistic photos of Crupi are normally easily distinguishable by the presence of a thick black band at the bottom, in which is written the title of the image and the catalog number, as was customary in commercial photos of the era, in addition to the signature of Crupi. In 1899 Crupi left Italy and opened a photographic studio in

near

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

, in Heliopolis. His studio in Teatro Greco,

, did not close. It was taken over by his brother-in-law, Francesco Galifi (Taormina 1865–1951), who specialised in Sicilian landscapes, not only making his own photographs but also printing out negatives from the Crupi archive, including works by von Gloeden. These images, often extremely large in format, were sometimes printed using the outdated salted paper technique which had been popular in the period before 1860. Working with various publishing houses, many of these photographs appeared as illustrations in books and magazines. The Galifi-Crupi studio opened its main branch under the clock tower in Piazza S. Agostino, and Giovanni Crupi rejoined the enterprise on his return from Egypt in 1910 (though he no longer took photographs).

Bibliography

*Mirisola, Vincenzo, and Vanzella, Giuseppe (edited by), Sicily mythical Arcadia. Von Gloeden and the "School" of Taormina, Edizioni people of photography, Palermo 2004, pp. 21–25. *Pohlmann, Ulrich, Wilhelm von Gloeden – Sehnsucht nach Arkadien, Nishen, Berlin 1987.

Collections

Works of Giovanni Crupi are in several public and private collections, including

Royal Academy of Arts The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House in Piccadilly London, England. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its ...

Getty Museum The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California, United States, housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. It is operated by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world's wealthies ...

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crupi, Giovanni 1859 births 1925 deaths