Photography is an art that in Italy is meeting with ever clearer success, and this book analyses the revolution of documentary photography through a great expert of the period between the two wars. By documentary style is meant a photographic practice in which the artist disappears to leave room for authentic duplicates of the world. Paradoxically it was one of the dominant styles of the twentieth century: August Sander and Walker Evans are only the best known names, but their influence was decisive on Diane Arbus and later on Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, and on American art after the war, from Pop Art to minimalism.