Mimmo Cozzolino

FOTOGRAFICS FROM ITALY, 1983. Exhibited 28 November–3 December, Seal Club, Melbourne

As a passionate young teacher of Italian, Elio Guarnuccio was unhappy with the Italian language textbooks available in Australia. His experience showed that kids found it easier to learn a language when it was framed within a realistic cultural context. He also knew that kids became more engaged in the learning process when pictures and cartoons were used. In the textbooks of the late 1970s these attributes were present only in rather primitive forms.

When I first met Elio in 1980 he told me that his vision was to revolutionize the way foreign languages were taught at primary and secondary schools in Australia. The time had arrived to introduce innovation, inspiration and fun to language teaching. He was starting with Italian because that was his specialty, but he had big plans for other languages as well. We got to work and I designed the first volume in the Avanti series. I enlisted the talents of Neil Curtis for the cartoons and drawings. Avanti was published in 1982 to early critical acclaim. Initial sales were excellent and the response from students and teachers was very enthusiastic.

We started planning for a follow up volume but being so far from Italy it was difficult, if not impossible, to get our hands on good reference material. Elio decided that the editorial team would go to Italy to gather material.

The northern hemisphere summer of 1983 was unusually hot. It was also very hazy (not ideal for photography). We had planned seven weeks’ work in Italy and it was going to be quite frantic if we were to cover all the places on the list. I hadn’t been to Italy, my place of birth, for almost a decade. Travelling with Elio Guarnuccio (publisher/teacher/writer/photographer) and me was also Michael Sedunary (teacher/writer/sound recordist).

We squeezed into a small hire car and raced around Italy, interviewing, recording, photographing and soaking up the atmosphere. We called on every one of our relatives and contacts and covered about 15 of the 20 regions of Italy, including Sicily and Sardinia.

The trip opened my eyes to the amazing country that Italy is: the presence and weight of history and religion; the culture, food and customs; the geography; the art, music and architecture. It was during this trip that I rediscovered and embraced my Italian roots. Up until that point, I had repressed them. Almost from the day I started at Holy Rosary School Kensington in 1961, four weeks after arriving in Australia, I had worked very hard to become a dinki-di Aussie. All I wanted to do was fit in. Later, I’d even researched and published a book called Symbols of Australia (Penguin, 1980) to prove that I was more Australian than the locals. So Italy was history– finito. The 1983 trip changed all that. It was a very liberating revelation and in many ways the exhibition I organized after I came back to Australia was a celebration of this rediscovery.

From the thousands of images I shot for the Avanti ‘reference library’, I chose 54 for my first solo exhibition in November 1983 (some of them shown here). My friend and master printer Tim Handfield produced a luminous set of Cibachrome II prints. Cibachrome– or ‘Cibas’, as they were colloquially called, were all the rage in the 1980s. I sold enough prints to recover all my production, framing, promotional and gallery hire costs, and I was hooked on photography and exhibiting.

Looking at some of the old Ciba prints from that 1983 show still in my possession, it is easy to see why they were so popular as a photographic medium. They project a luminosity, brilliance and crispness that is hard to compare with even the best substrates available today. I think good quality Cibas come closest to matching the same image displayed on a well calibrated LED computer screen.

As for Elio Guarnuccio and CIS Educational (the publishing company he started) they went from strength to strength. He was one of the best clients I ever had. He treated me and my team as an integral part of his creative team ensuring that the visual aspects of the books were as privileged as the words, thus increasing each project’s chance of greater success. In an industry list for ‘top-selling texts’ for 1992 Guarnuccio/Sedunary/CIS held the No.1 spot with Avanti, and the No.3 spot with its French equivalent.   MC