CARLO TAVAGNUTTI – A PASSION WITHOUT BOUNDARIES
by AGOSTINO COLLA
Carlo Tavagnutti, born in Gorizia in 1929, has been photographing since the 50s, dedicating himself mainly to the alpine landscape and to the testimonies of life on the “highlands”. He takes care of the photo shoots of Alpino goriziano. His photographs have appeared in the magazines
I have known Carlo for almost fifty years and with him I got to know the mountains through photography that he has been practicing for a lifetime. Mountain photography is Carlo Tavagnutti, without a shadow of a doubt and without uncertainty. The Alps, the Julian Alps in particular, are an ancient love, full of past and dreams. Harsh and difficult territories and, at the same time, places to meditate and listen to the slow rhythm of the signs of nature and the beauty of its horizons. The continuation of this enchantment, the fascination of these moments are testimonies collected by the light and shadows imprinted in these photographs. Colour narrates a place as reality presents it to us. Carlo Tavagnutti’s black and white takes us back to a timeless dimension, where feelings, thoughts, true dreams have increased in the memory that is fixed in our minds. These two-tone images are an invitation to enjoy these white limestone stones. Whether it is the Forcella del Vallone or the top of Triglav, the invitation is to go, climb, at a slow pace, carefully observing the severe nature that surrounds us. Nature, in these images, can represent a hellebore flower, a table that tells us about a forgotten past, what these images do not forget, however, are the gifts that this mountain offers us. These black and white photos are an invitation to slowness, to reflection, they capture distant horizons in the clear morning air. They arouse the amazement of a child and accompany you in the light that outlines their severe contours. They are the memory of a dream and the beauty of the silence of its peaks. They are a hymn to life and a treasure for man who knows its value.
In the spring of 2025, during the annual Congress of Delegates held in the city of Catania, Carlo Tavagnutti was awarded the Gold Medal by the National President of the CAI with the following motivation: “The prestigious award was given to him “for having narrated, with black and white photography, the soul of the Alps, helping to unite cultures and generations beyond borders, in the name of the values of the Association and of a mountain that is memory and future”. A tribute to his extraordinary sensitivity and his long commitment to telling the story of the Alpine world through images that remain in the collective memory.
(National Assembly of Delegates of the CAI – Italian Alpine Club for the awarding of the GOLD MEDAL to CARLO TAVAGNUTTI, born in 1929 from Gorizia, member of the CAI Section of Gorizia APS ETS since 1957).
I begin this story after hours spent together, in which I had the pleasure of knowing things, facts and characters unknown to most. A close, very interesting and precise dialogue in which the memories are still alive and still fixed in the memory of this person who undoubtedly made both photography and love for the mountains truly his own reason for living.
My initial intentions were to do an interview with it. I believed, however, that a story could have made the man, the person, his passions known, with greater completeness. The result that comes out makes us understand Carlo Tavagnutti’s approach to the mountains, his passion for photography, his working relationship with Alpino Goriziano and the GISM (Italian Group of Mountain Writers) which counts him among the academics as a mountain writer.
Tavagnutti is one of the most profound connoisseurs of our peaks, whether they are the Carnic or the Julian. He learned about the problems connected with them, including the local stories and characters and the events connected to them. In particular, constantly, Carlo has cultivated not only his passion for the mountains but also the ability to talk about it, to describe its times, situations and ways and this not only through the particular black and white photography but above all through the writings, sketches, drawings and watercolors that in the course of his long life he has outlined, letting us know a reality that has now radically changed in many ways. A mountain that seems to be, in his memories, that something that people have forgotten. Things that have profoundly and radically changed due to an innumerable series of factors, most of the time anthropic and social, determining the slow and progressive abandonment of the mountains by those who lived and worked in those places. For Carlo, however, it is still right to try to tell them and to revive these stories and human events and bring them back to a younger audience that has not known this environment and this world, ignoring the roots that have formed it over time. It is, if you like, a bit of the purpose of a lifetime, so that this complex knowledge can still have a voice because it is narrated by those who are able to do so. These memories were born in a distant time that has led Carlo Tavagnutti to now be an honorary member of the Italian Alpine Club of the Gorizia section. He has been a member for almost 70 years although, let’s face it, his passion and love for the mountains are much older.
But let’s start our story here. Carlo Tavagnutti: the mountains and photography. Undoubtedly, this combination in Carlo is of family origin.
The approach to the mountains was born through his father in the mid-40s. I would like to remember an episode and it is the one referring to the military activity in the Royal Army of his father Giacomo (Jacum). In the First World War he worked as a miner engineer at the Military Engineers of the Italian Army stationed in the Julian Alps near the town of Nevea. He had with him, for his passion, two cassette cameras, photographic plates with which he took scenes of life, portraits of friends and some landscapes for his pleasure. After the conquest of Gorizia in August 1916 he was called there to carry out his military duties and being unable to take this material with him, he worked to ensure that it was preserved as best he could by packing it with tar paper and burying it near the place where he operated in the mountains. More than forty years after the First World War, only in the 50s, together with his son Carlo he went back to the places in a now vain attempt to find the material hidden there so long before. Time, the nature of the places transformed by the long years that have passed or, simply, the fact that the material had most likely been taken by an unknown hand thwarted these searches.
The passion for photography, practiced only since the mid-fifties when our Carlo came into possession of a beautiful reflex camera. A fortunate meeting with one of his fellow soldiers, while he was as an instructor officer at the training school for alpine officers in Cesano di Roma, allowed him to get hold of a Contaflex with a Zeiss f2.8 objective – which also has a long history behind it. The first contacts with the mountain environment were determined by the fact that ours, at the beginning of the forties, accompanied on a long pilgrimage through the Carnic and Julian Alps, an elderly family friend, a certain “Dolfo”, a passionate researcher and great collector of edelweiss and queens of the Alps. In this way, in addition to getting to know the wonderful alpine flora, it allowed him to understand and become passionate about the environment of the mountains. For photography, on the other hand, the works of Arturo Avanzini, the great mountaineering and botanical photographer of the CAI of Gorizia, have been an example and stimulus for the photographic work of Carlo Tavagnutti. A strictly black and white photograph. This is what Carlo continues to do today, having a very substantial iconographic heritage behind him that allows him to express his passion through the pages of Alpino goriziano, the organ of the CAI section of Gorizia. Over time and refining his sensitivity, these images have given him the opportunity to develop the negatives and print the positives according to a very specific method; arriving at a particular attention all in all quite innovative for the time. The rather contrasting and decisive tones of black and white, proposed by Carlo, produce a print almost bordering on the dramatic, managing, however, to give depth and plasticity to the subject depicted, whether it is a ridge of a mountain, the approach of a saddle, a snow-capped peak, or a flower represented by a hellebore or an edelweiss. In fact, this way of photographing and above all of printing is the unique feature that characterizes the work of our Carlo Tavagnutti even today even if the work in the darkroom has now ceased a little for reasons of age. All his prints of all his works, all his endless production have these peculiar characteristics and as such are, even today, the material and testimonies that Alpino goriziano, the editorial organ of the Gorizia section of the Italian Alpine Club, uses for its magazine.
An important part of Carlo’s photography is “Flight with the eagle: images and thoughts on the Julian Alps”, published in 1998 by the Italian club section of Gorizia, which contains his photographs and important texts by Celso Macor. I specifically quote the initial assumption of this beautiful publication to pay tribute to both Macor’s words and Carlo’s images: ” The mountain we present is a mountain relived with ancient love, it is a mountain full of past and dreams. A mountain that we feel with an adult soul in returns full of reflection, in a deep becoming of feelings of mystery and magic. [..] This is the mountain of high landscapes, of peaks where the pause is longer and more meditated and the dialogue has slow listening. It is enjoying the boundless grandeur of a flower, it is the lighting up of panoramas that are filled with harmonies and solemn chorales, it is grasping the signs of nature and the prodigy of every life. This is a walking up and down, improvising a psalmody, pronouncing a thank you with bowed head for the gift of so much beauty. A walk listening to “the hum of silence” as Ervino Pocar wrote, waiting for “the birth of the myth”. We have tried, wrote Julius Kugy, not to let thoughts and feelings “die with us”, dreams, true Alpine charms that have also passed in front of us, moments that have belonged to us and that we want to prolong in the memory of a book[…] (quote from the introduction to the work “Volo con l’aquila: immagini e pensieri sulle Alpi Giulie” (B&V Editori Gorizia 1998)
Carlo Tavagnutti and the collaboration as a columnist writer with Alpino goriziano and as an Academician belonging to GISM (Italian Group of Mountain Writers)
Another publication that helps to understand how Carlo Tavagnutti fits in as a collaborator, columnist and writer with Alpino goriziano, the newspaper of the Italian Alpine Club of the Gorizia section, together with the fact that Carlo is counted among the academics of GISM (Italian Group of Mountain Writers) is the text entitled “Echoes from the Eastern Alps – 125 years of alpine culture”, published in 2008, which is a bit of a very important summary of all that mountaineering has meant not only for the CAI section of Gorizia but for all that has been and is the relationship of Gorizia with the mountains. A lasting and rather fruitful relationship, documented until the creation of the Gorizia section of the CAI. The text in particular reports writings by people such as Antonio Seppenhofer, Ervino Pocar, Eric Tuma, Celso Macor, Tiziana Weiss, Mario Lonzar, Sergio Tavano, Spiro Dalla Porta Xydias and many others. The text, and I quote from it “[..] The great variety of authors, often of great human and literary value, corresponds to a no less great variety of themes treated. These reflect the forms and interests of Alpine and mountaineering cultures in Gorizia, where German- and Slovenian-speaking Alpine societies were also active from the beginning. The reserved attitude of the Gorizia people comes to light without, however, this being able to veil a constant civil and cultural commitment. An inveterate and habitual vision emerges, as ethically severe as it is largely open in an exquisitely European sense on the variegated and difficult world of the eastern Alps [..]” From the reading of the various texts in this publication, the relationship that Gorizia has built with the mountains emerges strongly and this thanks to the CAI. Thanks to all these personalities, the bond that the city has had with the mountains over the years, starting from the end of the nineteenth century and, certainly throughout the twentieth century, has been fruitful, lasting, expressed with strength and constancy by all those who, frequenting the mountains, have spoken of them, have described their peculiar characteristics making them loved. They were the architects and witnesses whose work managed to make the Eastern Alps deeply known. They should not be forgotten even if, nowadays, this fruitful relationship seems to have been downsized, almost diluted, due to multiple factors A truly meritorious memory and initiative that we still remember with great pleasure and that traced a path then taken by others and that led, at the beginning of the 60s of the twentieth century, to the creation of the 30 peaks of friendship, that is, a form of collaboration between the various Alpine Clubs of the bordering countries of the Alps Carinthia and Slovenia specifically. This form of friendship has led to forms of intense and very productive participation. The idea of stimulating meetings between the friends of the Mountains of the three bordering regions of Carinthia, Friuli Venezia-Giulia and Slovenia, at least once a year, was born back in 1953, at the inauguration of the monument to J. Kugy, in Val Trenta. Of all the joint mountaineering initiatives, the idea of Miha Potočnik, Karl Kuchar and Mario Lonzar, the ” Peaks of Friendship” and the “Julian Alps Conferences“, after the first meeting in Villach in 1965, had the greatest consensus. At present, and precisely on the recommendation of the CAI of Gorizia, the Peaks of Friendship, today, have become 60, 20 for each region. Surely this special and engaging way of conceiving the mountain allowing you to experience it in a conscious way has been a positive flywheel that has allowed many people to get to know and appreciate the peaks of the Carnic and Julian Alps but, at the same time, to bring many generations of Gorizia residents closer in the past and present. Today, however, times have radically changed and even the frequentation of the mountains has undergone great changes; or for the means of transport, for the accurate signage of the routes and also for the enormous proliferation of guides that affect the entire Alpine arc and that facilitate hikers and mountaineers, thus giving rise to new forms of associationism. Today’s scenes of easy access to our mountains, literally prey to an impressive number of people, sometimes even poorly equipped, the accesses to the various paths made passable by any means, the indiscriminate and culpable production of waste by mountain hikers, the poor preparation combined with widespread and generalized rudeness, the spasmodic interest of the various “social networks” regarding the mountain phenomenon are a real problem to be reconsidered. The attention of the press in this summer period points out precisely these inconsistencies. What is perhaps missing is the fact that, lacking the culture of a certain activity and the correct criteria for consciously enjoying a good that we consider common, they lead to these perverse behaviors that have nothing to do with love and respect for the mountains. All these factors, mentioned over and over again in his articles in Alpino Goriziano, outline and confirm the current state of affairs regarding the mountains and their conscious use. The furrow, in which to place the figure of Carlo Tavagnutti is this; for the love and dedication to the mountains, its conscious conservation is the result of an articulated and complex knowledge of the many factors that characterize it and trace its history. A history and an essential bond.
An act of love to be preserved and made known:
Have a good life my dear friend.
To learn more: https://www.caigorizia.it/ – https://spdg.eu/