Mario Dondero

This is a new edition of the definitive monograph on one of the greatest Italian photographers, Mario Dondero, a legendary figure of world photojournalism, after the first edition published under the supervision of the author shortly before his death.
The quality and richness of the contributions of great names in journalism and culture and the extensive, careful selection, made by Dondero himself, of photographs, many of which were previously unpublished, testifying to over sixty years of activity and confirming the volume as the first and still the only exhaustive catalogue of his work. The photographs reproduced in the volume reveal a participatory gaze in the stories of life and the interest in the destinies of human beings that characterized Dondero’s work and created an aura of sympathy, affection and joy around him. So it happened that the frankness of his impulses and the depth of his humanity ended by prevailing in the judgments of critics over a necessary investigation into the quality of his photographic story, devoid of any decoration and artifice, but certainly not of style and aesthetic quality.

After a substantial series of initial essays presenting his achievement within Italian and European photojournalism, the volume is divided into four sections dedicated to his photographic stories. The chronological and geographical order helps to lucidly reconstruct the photographer’s view of the political, social, cultural events of the long century, as well as to recognise in the portrait’s celebrities and ordinary people in the epic of everyday life. His most famous black and white photographs and a fair amount of lesser-known colour shots, together with the testimonies of those who knew and loved him, help to compose the “book of life”.


The volume is part of the series of monographs Electaphoto, devoted to the best-known names in contemporary photography, but also to some who have unjustly remained in the shadows, unpublished, presented after careful studies. The series reconstructs, through a group of authors chosen to achieve an interdisciplinary approach, a cultural history of photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. These are books to read, as well as to look at and understand.