Memory Connection and Loss: The Work of Hope Herman Wurmfeld
Courtesy of © Hope Herman Wurmfeld
When photographer Hope Herman Wurmfeld moved from New York City to Rome in early 1964, post-war Italy’s so-called “Economic Miracle” was still taking shape, with companies like Fiat attracting with the promise of gainful employ impoverished occupants of the nation’s heel, arch and toe (and Sicily, the boot’s deflated soccer ball?) to relatively affluent northern cities like Turin and Milan.
But while it was a nation swelling with renewed prosperity and the promise of the kind of luminous modernity embodied by England, France and the United States, the pictures Wurmfeld took in the years she spent there depict an Italy with one leg in a simpler past; her new collection, Vintage: Italy 1964, affords a fine view of this shapely appendage, its stockinged outline untroubled by the trash jewelry of industrialization.
While the young Wurmfeld had already developed an interest in photography prior to her arrival, Rome - and in particular Trastevere, at that time still something of a working class neighborhood - proved...click here to read the full article, and go to hopewurmfeld.com to purchase her work.