Monograph by Aldo Bonasia (1949-1995), one of the photographers who best documented demonstrations and street clashes in a black and white city of Milan that seems so far away from today.
L’Io in Divisa (The Uniformed Self) – whose title is a pun on the most famous work of the psychiatrist Ronald Laing – The divided self – presents about seventy photos, many of them dramatic, focusing on policemen in war gear or in plain clothes.
The text from the Police Encyclopedia contrasts with the images for the involuntary grotesque comedy of some of the definitions, for example: ‘masturbation: a deadly vice that sometimes leads to early death’.
In Parr & Badger Volume III: “Like only a very few other photographers – Don McCullin or Paolo Pellegrin might be seen as two examples – Bonasia was able to make perfectly composed, suitably dramatic, ‘decisive moment’ photographs even under the most extreme physical conditions”.
