Views & Reviews The Wonder of Innocence Gina Lollobrigida Terrible Awesome Photobooks Erik Kessels Paul Kooiker Photography

A Sex Symbol's Innocence

Gina Lollobrigida's latest project -- The actress-turned-author unveils a book of photomontages

For several years, Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels have organized evenings for friends in which they share the strangest photo books in their collections. The books shown are rarely available in regular shops, but are picked up in thrift stores and from antiquaries. The group’s fascination for these pictorial non-fiction books comes from the need to find images that exist on the fringe of regular commercial photo books. It’s only in this area that it’s possible to find images with an uncontrived quality. This constant tension makes the books interesting. It’s also worth noting that these tomes all fall within certain categories: the medical, instructional, scientific, sex, humour or propaganda. Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels have made a selection of their finest books from within this questionable new genre.

PHOTOBOOKS CHALLENGING THE EDGES OF THE MEDIUM. A conversation with Paul Kooiker about two newsprint editions on photobooks, in cooperation with Erik Kessels and published by APE: Terrible Awesome Photobooks and Incredible Small Photobooks

PK:
About 30% is about wrong eroticism. Other material relates to medical issues. Those are areas of interest of mine. The nude, how that is represented in books, but also propaganda I consider very interesting, and there are always other curiosities. For example the book The Wonder of Innocence (1994) by Gina Lollobrigida has been available at former bookseller De Slegte  for 5 Dutch Guilders. And it’s so badly done, that makes it genius … And that was even before the photoshop era. 

MT:
The Wonder of Innocence is from your collection? And what makes it so artificial or mannered?

PK:
Yes. The absolute innocence of it, but it overshoots itself… It’s so freaking kitch.

MT:
Who made this book?

PK:
She did! Gina Lollobrigida is a photographer, that’s the funny part! These are her pictures. At the same time, it’s over the top. In short, if Peter Fischli & David Weiss would have made it, I would have bought it too!

By Tim Appelo on Dec 23, 1994

Gina Lollobrigida, 67, had no intention of becoming the international star of such movies as Beautiful But Dangerous and Trapeze.''I am a painter and a sculptor, and by chance I did movies,'' says La Lollo, as she was known in her sexpot heyday. Now, Lollobrigida has produced her artistic magnum opus: The Wonder of Innocence, which contains over 150 photomontages of children and animals from around the world, culled from some 300 pictures that the actress snapped over the last 14 years.

''When I am with a camera, I'm like in a trance,'' says Lollobrigida. ''I actually use the camera like a paintbrush. I did the book because I was in need of express(ing) my fantasy, and I thought to do children and animals was so amusing, so poetic — it was like Walt Disney.'' Accompanying the images are apposite quotes from thinkers throughout the ages: Confucius, Shakespeare, Shaw, Lollobrigida. ''Some are very funny, and some they are, ah...deep,'' she says. (One example: ''Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more,'' from the Irish poet James Stephens, which appears with the photo ''Girl Looking at a Mandarin Duck.'')

When it comes to art, Lollobrigida is a Renaissance woman. ''I don't like this modern art, this kind of craziness — 'abstract.' This make me angry!'' she says. ''When you put a naked woman looking at a mirror in a museum with a horse that is not bronze and say that is a sculpture — that's not art anymore because they went too far.'' (The first reference may be to 1932's Girl Before a Mirror by Picasso, whom Lollobrigida considers something of a fraud.)

However, her own photos — which often portray her now-grown son, Milko, as a child in such tableaux as ''Naked Boy With Water Hose and Jaguar'' — are weird enough to earn La Lollo a place next to artist Sally Mann (known for controversial nude photos of her own children) on a Jesse Helms hit list. Lollobrigida's four previous photo books were fairly conventional; but this time, with images like ''Boy With Swiss Cheese and Nibbling Mice'' (above, far right) and ''American Bald Eagle Carrying a Baby in Its Beak'', she's definitely tilted toward surrealism — which happens to be the one modern art trend she can endorse with enthusiasm. ''Dalí? Chapeaux! (Hats off!)'' she exclaims with a flourish, tipping an imaginary brim.

Lollobrigida had her own world-famous, Clement Greenberg-like critic advising her on this latest project: Mother Teresa, who penned the book's foreward (''Let us love the child, the most beautiful creation of God ''). In 1990, Lollobrigida (who has volunteered for UNICEF and Somalian relief efforts) met Mother Teresa in Calcutta and showed her a photo of Mexican, Japanese, Indian, and African kids astride a giraffe's neck. The star recalls, ''The first thing Mother Teresa said was, 'Where is the white boy?' Brightwoman!'' So, in the interests of multiculturalism and world peace, La Lollo added a redheaded French boy standing on the giraffe's ear to the photo that adorns the book's back cover.

''I succeed because these are nice imagination photographs,'' concludes Lollobrigida, though she steadfastly refuses to specify her photomontage method. (''No computer,'' she insists. ''I manage. I (have) the patience of a saint.'') She might also add, echoing an Oscar Wilde quote in The Wonder of Innocence: ''I have nothing to declare except my genius.''

The List & Review Erik Kessels Paul Kooiker Terribly awesome photo books

The List & Review Erik Kessels Paul Kooiker Terribly awesome photo books