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Matinee: 'Morandi's Books'
31 May 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 606th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Mary Ellen Bartley: Morandi's Books.
In this 5:05 video, Mary Ellen Bartley tells us how she was inspired by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi's still lifes. Not only did she focus on geometry and form but she most recently focuses on Morandi's own books from his personal library in Bologna.
It was a dream project but the pandemic forced her to leave Italy. She started making collages and photographing the collages. She also became interested in the glassine dust covers she had seen. "I felt like it was the real key to the project," she says, "expressing this barrier and distance and fragility."
In June 2022, she returned to Bologna and Morandi's house. This time she combined Morandi's objects, which were the subject of his still lifes, with his books.
She also photographed details from these objects, including pages within some of the books where Morandi had underlined the text. Those images ultimately became the book Reading Morandi, returning the project full circle to where it began. In a book.