Tano D’Amico is probably the most important photographer of the ’77 movement in Italy. His photographs have become iconic images representing those struggles and have often been re-published. Surprisingly, however, we could not locate a fully scanned copy of this booklet on the web.
This stunning book was published in 1977 by Lotta Continua, which D’Amico had involvement with. Its title can be translated as If you don’t know us: The class struggle of the 1970s in Tano’s photos. It contains 90 photos, most of which had been published previously in Lotta Continua, the daily newspaper of Italy’s extra-parliamentary left.
The background, according to an explanatory blurb on the back (roughly translated) is this:
“The notebook was produced by the 15 June Printing House, a printing house established in Rome with the subscription of thousands of comrades to serve the needs of the class movement. It is priced at 1,000 lire per copy. The proceeds from the sales will be devoted to the subscription of the daily Lotta Continua which needs, in order to survive, to raise 180 million [Lire] by August 1977.”
Here are just a sample of the photos in the booklet (all black and white, as is D’Amico’s style):
This booklet is scarce. According to OCLC, there are 5 institutionally-held copies internationally, with the only U.S. copy held by Beinecke at Yale (Yale has purchased D’Amico’s papers for years and built quite the archive, here). Copies are sometimes available in the used book trade, but they tend to go for very high prices. While we were able to locate selected photos online, we could not locate an entire scan of the booklet. Accordingly, we scanned it in full and have uploaded it here for those interested.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 