SIGNED Ninio Migliori - Muri [ Walls ] - 2004

Exceptionally signed copy on the title page by Nino Migliori (born 1926); unique and unobtainable signed copy. 144 pages and more than a hundred black-and-white and color photographs, most full-page, with Flavio Eugenio Marelli's Italian text at the beginning of the book and English at the end. Paperback edition with a soft, fold-out cover illustrated on the front. In excellent condition, practically like new.

“Muri” (Walls) is one of the most emblematic and conceptual series by the Italian photographer Nino Migliori, started in the early 1950s and continued until the late 1970s. Through this exploration, Migliori ceases to merely document the neorealist reality of postwar Italy to transform the urban fabric into true visual poems, abstract and informal. For Nino Migliori, the exterior wall is not an inert surface, but a public diary, an space of absolute freedom where the collective unconscious of man expresses itself since prehistoric times. Migliori observed what often escapes our gaze and isolates fragments of facades to reveal textures created by time, nature, and human intervention. His photographs capture the “leprosy” of saltpeter, sediment of paint, scratches, as well as spontaneous writings, political slogans, or children's drawings traced with chalk or carved into plaster. Alongside the raw textures, Migliori is interested in the accumulation of posters—advertising or political—overlaid on city walls. By photographing the torn and weathered layers, he anticipates and accompanies the near-Realist artistic movement of decollage in French Nouveau Réalisme. Fortuitous juxtapositions of faces, vivid colors, and morsels of text create a totally new and accidental plastic writing. Other series eliminate street perspective to focus solely on the flat surface of the support, and Nino Migliori thus creates graphic compositions that constantly oscillate between figuration and pure abstraction. In the series Déchiré Affiches (Torn Posters), phantom images shaped by time and nature emerge from paint coatings and cracked plaster amid children’s doodles traced by unknown hands, transforming into fascinating abstract compositions.

Nino Migliori (born 1926) began taking photographs in 1948 as an autodidact and quickly became part of the same photographic group as Mario Giacomelli, Piergiorgio Branzi and a few others, the “Misa” itself stemming from the group “La Bussola” led by Giuseppe Cavalli. A leading figure of the postwar neorealist school of photography, Migliori produced a rich and meaningful body of work in postwar Italy. “We had barely emerged from the war and I felt the need to grasp life, reality, by fixing the moments of everyday life which today seem banal but which at the time carried a strong meaning, tied no doubt to the feeling of freedom and the possibility of choice.” Some of his most intriguing photographs were designed as sequences presenting a story from start to finish, such as “Ragazzi della via” (Street Boys) 1955, where a gang of six boys engaged in a battle simulation, armed with clubs, rush through the frame. Migliori’s photographs also include extraordinary urban landscapes offering a bird’s-eye view of Bologna or these architectural abstractions of Milan, where highly contrasting scenes reveal striking patterns.

Alongside the representation of reality, Nino Migliori engaged in various creative experiments to conceive new images with techniques such as oxidation, pyrograms and hydrograms, or older methods like cliche-verre (glass plate photograms) or photograms. With Polaroid he explored the possibility of leaving his own imprint on photographic paper during the short development period, “the image developed before my eyes and gradually warped and reformed on the surface, signs red, yellow, black, depending on the intensity of the pressure.” Of astonishing youth, Nino Migliori inaugurated in spring 2024 a substantial exhibition at the Ferrara Ducal Castle titled “An Endless Search”… and on May 15, 2026, in this centenary year, he opened another large exhibition in the town of Alba with his friend Ferdinando Scianna.

Book from my personal collection in excellent condition, practically like new, kept with the utmost care. Shipped protected with reinforced packaging and guaranteed international tracking. For multiple purchases, possible grouped shipping with reimbursement of any excess postage paid via PayPal.

0.950 kg excluding packaging