The Written World and the Unwritten World

In Italo Calvino’s short story “The Adventure of a Photographer” (1958), the protagonist, Antonino, is a Kodak-moment skeptic, disparaging the modern urge to document one’s life for future retrospection. But after he accidentally takes a good picture of a friend at the beach, Antonino becomes obsessed with producing perfect images of subjects that normally evade the camera: heating pipes in his room, a damp stain on the wall, an ashtray full of butts. To fulfill his ideal of capturing the truth of these “unphotographable” things, he concludes he has no choice but to photograph photographs themselves. Calvino’s story is a neat allegory about the limits of art and literature, from a writer who had started out a committed postwar realist and then turned eagerly toward myth, fantasy, magic, and an avant-garde distrust of mimesis.