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The late 19th and the early 20th century was a time when photography was a tool in the hands of men who were not photographers at all, but individuals trying to catalogue the places, the people, the flora and fauna of their country or far away places that their fellow citizens back home did not have the possibility to see with their own eyes. Then, photography was the most precise brush to draw a faithful sketch of the world as it was. Before television and internet streaming videos allowed anybody to have a glimpse of anything on earth, only travelling photographers were able to show the vast richness and the miseries of spots never heard of before.
In Italy, those were the days of the Alinari brothers, the first ones to have a modern concept of photography, which they looked upon as a real and proper job, a professional activity to sustain their lives providing their customers with what they needed. On the other hand, there were anthropologists, explorers, and missionaries who were in need of images for their own studies or just to record facets of cultures that were unknown to the western man or already in danger of extinction. Guido Boggiani, for instance, who went to South America to study the indigenous population. He produced astonishing portraits of young men and women whose beauty was unparalleled by any report given in travel books and memoirs which lacked the truthfulness and the precision of visual communication. Or father Leone Nani, who visited China as a missionary and felt the need to record visually a country so different from Italy. But one of the most modern characters of that early stage in the history of photography was Luigi Piovano, born near Turin in 1868. He went to China in 1900 as a soldier of the Italian army in order to hold in check the Boxer revolt, but his fondness for photography and his vast production made him one of the first 'embedded' photographers whose work is still to be fully appreciated.
First he visited...