Claude Nori - Stromboli - 2015

I am auctioning this rare copy of “Stromboli,” one of Claude Nori’s most emblematic works, published by Éditions Contrejour. A true ode to summer, to Italy, and to sensuality, this book carries the reader to the island group of the Aeolian Islands through Nori’s humane and poetic perspective. It is a centerpiece for any collector of 20th-century photography books.

Published to accompany the exhibition “Stromboli” at the Polka Gallery, in Paris from May 23 to June 20, 2015.

In 1989 and 1990, Claude Nori went to Stromboli following in the footsteps of Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman for a voyage of love and a photographic homage to this mythic film, which would yield a powerful, passionate work released as a book in 1991. In 1949, Roberto Rossellini had already fallen in love with Ingrid Bergman, a Swedish actress living in Hollywood, married, who had just emerged from an affair with Robert Capa, the renowned photojournalist who, with Henri Cartier-Bresson, founded Magnum. In 1949, Ingrid Bergman had watched Rossellini’s two films Paisa and Rome, Open City. She loved them, and he sent her a genuine love letter, to which the director responded by inviting her to shoot in Stromboli on a stark black-and-white island dominated by an erupting crater, so as to extract her from the world and keep her entirely for himself in the volcano’s fury and the harshness of its inhabitants.

A reprint was essential. And it has been done. Claude Nori insisted on conducting a new editing and selecting some new photographs, offering a new design accompanied by a preface by Alain Bergala, critic at Cahiers du cinéma, filmmaker, author of numerous works on Rossellini, Kiarostami, and Godard; preface by Alain Bergala, black-and-white photos.

“In July 1990, I undertook a first stay on Stromboli to stoke the embers of Ingrid [Bergman] and Roberto [Rossellini]’s love with a series of photographs marked by the landscape, the sea, and fire, as well as by the sensuality of the island’s young girls – excerpt from the presentation text.”