Dissemination of picture copies through different archives: the visual power of Cesare Battisti’s death
Gemma Torre
Photographs are documents and as such are used to show a message and in particular a visual message. The study of this typology of documents could highlight the activists’s power concept in the selection of memory, already unanimously affirmed. In fact, postcards of historical occurances, especially at the beginning of their circulation, were replicated identically from photos and in large amounts, then preserved, and therefore, not destroyed by archivists. Although from an archival point of view identical pictures are copies, several files exactly alike are often preserved in different archives. The aim of the article is to try to recognize that the preservation of images, like records, is the result of an archivist’s personal selection. This paper analyzes a sample case study, the archiving of pictures related to irridentist Cesare Battisti’s death in Trento on July 12, 1916.