A week ago I (Clarissa) had the chance to visit the exhibition Fotoromanzo e poi... in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The exhibition ran from April 20th to July 19th 2018 at the Spazio Gerra and was organized on three floors. The first floor struck the visitor with beautiful images, large-sized and high-quality photographs printed from old photo-novel negatives. It also showed how to create the layout of a photo-novel page and, at a light table with pages of old photo-novels without text, visitors could put into practice what they had just learned and use tracing paper to write their personalized text. The second floor highlighted a brief history of the phenomenon of the photo-novel, with among other
This article originally appeared on Electronic Book Review and can be accessed here. The film photo novel magazine, a low-brow merger of the film novel and the photo novel that was hugely popular in the late fifties when people liked to read these films in print, can be considered today a forgotten genre or medium -not just an unknown or understudied genre or medium, but simply a lost one, to the extent that even specialists of film history and photo narrative may completely ignore its existence. To quote just one example, to give an idea of what these publications actually looked like: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator the Gallows, also released under the title Lift to the Scaffold, 1958)
