Before modern language. Domestic photography and visual experimentation in Mariano Fortuny Madrazo

Abstract

This article examines the photographic practice of Mariano Fortuny Madrazo through research conducted between 2023 and 2026 in the documentary and photographic collections preserved at the Fortuny Museum in Venice. The analysis of his negatives, glass plates, albums, and travel photographs makes it possible to reconstruct the role that images played within his artistic activity and to understand how domestic photography functioned as a space for documentation and visual experimentation during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through the case of Fortuny, the study argues that several strategies later associated with photographic modernity—such as fragmented framing, attention to detail, serial image construction, the exploration of light, and the narrative organization of photographic albums—were already present in private photographic practices far removed from the theoretical formulations of the historical avant-gardes. The article proposes interpreting these photographs as manifestations of an emerging visual sensibility that, prior to the consolidation of photographic modernity, contributed to the formation of contemporary visual culture.