Giovanni Crupi (1859–1925) was an Italian photographer of

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

, active in

Taormina Taormina ( , , also , ; scn, Taurmina) 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 ...

and

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

(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 boy ...

. 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 ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...

, 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 on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its purpo ...

Getty Museum The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The Getty Center is located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and fe ...

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crupi, Giovanni 1859 births 1925 deaths