Milan, 1950: between the corridors of the Brera Academy and the architecture classrooms of the Politecnico, the pioneering minds of Marirosa and Aldo Ballo crossed. They studied and worked: thanks to their shared passion for photography and their family history (her father was a professional photographer), they dedicated themselves to reportage, selling their photographs to the Corriere della Sera newspaper. They studied and teamed up with Bruno Munari, Gae Aulenti and Massimo Vignelli, with whom they contemplated their future and shared the history of a country in the process of reconstruction, unaware that they were the first generation of what would be called the ‘creative class’ of the 21st century.
Bohemian newlyweds (they get married right after Christmas 1953, on December 26), they enter together what could be defined as the first year of Italian design: television, just arrived in the country, innovates the way of looking at reality; the first Compasso d’Oro is created to award the most innovative objects produced by industry; the economic boom introduces beauty into the gestures of everyday life: a kind of gigantic cultural operation on several fronts. Communication and advertising, which until then had relied on illustration to disseminate their content, began to consider photography as a more effective means of conveying a sense of form and thus of design.
The Ballos’ house/studio, which would continue this formula in its various locations, grows larger and larger, becoming a laboratory for experimentation in film, set design, advertising and graphics, where photography is seen as a representational tool with many expressive capacities: everything technological/analog that exists is present in the studio, there is a sense of modernity, rigor, order and scientific rationality: the search for perfection typical of excellence in any discipline.
The dynamism of the studio is reminiscent of Bauhaus methods, the sets are more or less complex scenographies, from the limbo to the perspective box; from still life, true product portraits, to the more demanding compositions of furniture sets that reproduce in the studio what happens in a domestic interior, in dialogue with the perspective box constituted by the view camera. Everything that leads to the birth of the image is done thanks to the collaboration and exchange with the people who frequent the couple: many young assistants who later go out on their own, having learned, in addition to the craft, a way of life, of thinking, of being.
Aldo and Marirosa are surrounded by intellectuals, architects and designers, art critics and artists from many disciplines: Lucio Fontana, Mario Soldati, Osvaldo Borsani, the Castiglioni brothers, Magistretti, Dorfles, Giò and Arnaldo Pomodoro, Alik Cavaliere, Gio Ponti, Cini Boeri, Ettore Sottsass, Enzo Mari, Alessandro Mendini, Pino Tovaglia, Bob Noorda, Max Huber, who especially inspired Aldo Ballo with the sharp, essential, luminous and unretouched vision in the practice of still life.
Accompanied by close friends who were architects and designers, in a few years the Ballos achieved a very strong specialization in the photography of design and the industrially produced object, hand in hand with the birth of the great Italian furniture companies, which became known throughout the world also thanks to the Ballos’ photographs.
The link with the world of publishing is automatic: Casa Vogue and its covers tell the story of the evolution of the Ballo style from the fifties to the nineties. A style based on the control of light, very soft, but also on the ability to eliminate elements so as not to alter the understanding of the real object, which finds a new form of life in the photographic product. One of the most beautiful things they have left us, in addition to a magnificent archive, is the immaterial and intangible cultural legacy of their adventure: having understood how to communicate design.
