Italy Street Photographs 1978-1986 - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A vibrant visual journey through Italy from 1978 to 1986, Jörg Rubbert's analog photographs capture everyday life across Italian cities and the countryside with empathy and authenticity. Using classic Kodachrome film, Rubbert documents scenes in Florence, Venice, Pisa, Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, Elba, and the Italian Riviera. His candid street photography focuses on ordinary people--retirees, children, nuns, workers--presenting evocative snapshots of a society on the cusp of change. Inspired by Italian neorealist cinema and the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, these images reflect both nostalgia and transformation, revealing the spirit of "la dolce vita" amid shifting social realities. Timeless, unmanipulated, and deeply human, this collection offers an intimate time capsule of Italy's urban and rural life, seen through the lens of a curious outsider

Review Quotes

In his volume ITALY - Street Photographs 1978-1986 he captures with analog precision and summery lightness a world that seems long gone and yet still lives on in our hearts. (...) What distinguishes the pictures is not just the subtle documentary eye, but also the sensual immersion into a slower-paced way of life.

Rubbert does not photograph with distance, but with sympathy - with a heart that beats for Italy.


- Dragana Mimic, Photo Klassik

Above all, it is unspectacular scenes, captured from Rubbert's personal subjective perspective without staging. Scenes taken from everyday life, genuine and thus authentic. (...) On the streets, what interests Rubbert happens: the everyday life of people. In keeping with Pasolini's works and films, he sympathizes with the so-called ordinary people and their economically difficult circumstances.


- Kirstin Rappmund, ProfiFoto

Joerg Rubbert's Italy book evokes for me the memory of the heat I felt on our first trip to Italy. It stirs memories of children's voices in Italian streets, of the boys playing football who let me join in.

(...) He rediscovers in his images the analog, slow-paced world, the changed relationship with the factor of time, people in their growing dependence on modern media. (...) Jörg Rubbert's Italy book exerts a fascination on the viewer, at least on anyone who has ever visited this country with love and affection. And what certainly holds true for the book is that images can mature over decades.

- Juergen Buergin, A visual zine

Perhaps it is precisely... this relatively tightly defined time frame that intensifies the mood of those years and lets us see their supposed lightness and carefree nature in the images. The 'feel-good pictures' confront us with the provocative thesis that maybe not everything was worse in the past.
- Martin Breutmann, fotoforum

The documentary perspective is reminiscent of the visual language of Italian neorealism.


- Sarah Alexandra Fechler, Photoscala