ABSTRACT
Over the course of the First World War, the use of photography at the front intensified and its products were mass-diffused. It played a major logistical role in the conduction of military actions, as well in assuring media coverage of the European trenches for the benefit of the home front. Drawing from several Italian examples, this chapter analyses the anthropological role of the album as an optical device for familiarising the human gaze with "the destructive character" of Modernity, and for composing and practising the visual materiality of historical time. Since the 1970s, the new methodological and transdisciplinary approaches of cultural history have developed a growing scientific interest towards the participation of the masses in the First World War. In the specific chronotope of the Italian albums, the standardisation process is incremented by the successive re-elaboration and picture cataloguing operated during fascism, when the ideology of the nation is radicalised.
