The exhibition at the Museum of Photography is divided into three itineraries.
The first illustrates photography as a “fatal invention” by tracing its evolution through the first techniques and uses of photography.
The second itinerary explores the themes of travel, portraiture, and landscape through the exhibition of photographic evidence from the 19th and 20th centuries.
The third is a chronicle of the war events relating to the Second Colonial War in Ethiopia and natural disasters such as the earthquake that struck Messina in 1908.
The museum houses prints made using various photographic techniques: daguerreotypes, calotypes, ambrotypes, salted papers, coloured albumins, cyanotypes, megalithoscopies, collodion prints, stereoscopies and silver bromide prints.
There are works by Marville, Righi, Philipot, Sommer, Nadar, Brogi, Alinari, MacPherson, D’Alessandri.
Finally, some rooms house a rich collection of terracotta whistles. The whistle shapes represent all that the artisan’s eye and creativity could focus on anthropomorphic and zoomorphic models, saints, illustrious personalities, towards whom the whistle shape became a mocking outburst or an irreverent satire.
