Marcella Pedone, the first Italian freelance photographer born in Rome in 1919, has passed away. She had turned 103 on April 27. Since she was a girl, free and curious in spirit, Marcella travels a lot, especially in northern Europe and Germany. In Nuremberg she buys her first camera, a Rolleiflex Automat 6x6 Model K4A. For the Volkshochschulen (evening folk universities), she organizes projections of her own shots accompanied by folk songs, which present to the German public a largely unknown Italy: a predominantly pre-industrial country in the process of transformation, “refined and at the same time archaic”. The success gives her a decent reputation and the collaboration with Bavaria, the most important German photographic agency. Back in Italy, she starts a collaboration with Ferrania, which entrusts her with the experimentation and promotion of her color film, photographic but also cinematographic in 16 mm, which she tests in different light conditions. Equipped with a Bell&Howell camera and free in the choice of subjects, Marcella Pedone enters those years in the purely male world of documentary production. The passage of Ferrania in 1964 under the control of the American 3M, led her to start an autonomous career. Pedone's work stands out in the sector for her documentary attitude, rigorous preparation, attentive look and ethnographic curiosity. In 2017, she donated to the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan her archive of 170,000 shots taken in over fifty years of activity together with the cameras she had used. A 'treasure' that has since become an object of study. The first monographic exhibition dedicated to the real and legendary world of the Dolomites was dedicated to her in 2021.
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