Roberto Donetta: The Forgotten Photographer of Swiss Village Life

Dec 22, 2024
7 min read

Split image: left shows a man with a camera on a hill, backdrop of mountains; right depicts the man with a floral scarf, newspaper text visible.

In the remote Blenio Valley of Ticino, on the southern side of the Swiss Alps, a man once wandered the rugged paths between villages carrying a plate camera, a set of portable backdrops, and a bag of seeds. He had no studio. He had no reliable income. He had debts he would never fully repay. He was, by most practical measures, a failure.

Roberto Donetta was also one of the great photographers of the early 20th century. He just didn't know it, and neither did anyone else. When he died in 1932, the 5,000 glass plate negatives he left behind were considered worthless. They sat in an attic for half a century. When they were finally developed for the first time in 1993, what emerged was an extraordinary archive of a world that had otherwise vanished without trace.

Five men seated outdoors, four playing accordions, one with a guitar. They're in suits, against a building with a window. Vintage vibe.

Born Poor in the Wrong Valley

Donetta was born in 1865 in Biasca, in the canton of Ticino in Italian-speaking southern Switzerland. The Blenio Valley, where he would spend most of his adult life, was one of the poorest corners of the country. Most of the men born there left. The valley had a centuries-old tradition of emigration: families sent their sons north to the cities or abroad to find work, remitting wages home to sustain households that the land alone couldn't support.

Donetta followed the same path. In his early adult years he ran a small grocery store in Corzoneso, briefly served as a military officer in Castro, and at some point made his way to Northern Italy, where he sold chestnuts on the streets. Then he went further, to London, where like many Ticinese emigrants of the period he worked as a waiter. He lasted fifteen months before returning home sick and exhausted.

Back in the valley, he became a seed salesman, trading packets of vegetable and flower seeds from village to village on foot. He married Teodolinda Tinetti in 1886 and had seven children, none of whom he was able to adequately provide for. His financial life was a sustained crisis.

The pivot came around 1900, when he met Dionigi Sorgesa, a local sculptor who taught him the basics of photography and gifted him his first camera. Donetta took to it immediately and with unmistakable seriousness. Within a short time he had merged his seed trade with a new calling: travelling photographer.

Men in suits playing bocce on a dirt lane in a village, with spectators nearby. A bicycle leans on a wall. "Trattoria" sign visible.

The Wandering Photographer

Without a studio, Donetta carried his own backdrops with him, stretching them between trees or pinning them against stone walls to create makeshift portrait environments wherever he worked. He made pictures for weddings, funerals, feast days, and simple family records. He produced postcards for local sale. He walked the paths of the valley in all seasons, knocking on doors, offering his services, extending credit he couldn't afford to extend.

Men in casual attire pose with an oversized dental tool, pretending to extract a seated man's tooth. Others watch, playful mood. Vintage setting.

What he produced, over three decades, was something far beyond what the commercial brief required. His portraits have a quality that professional studio photographers of the era rarely achieved: his subjects appear, as critics and curators have repeatedly noted, to have forgotten the camera was there. There's a directness and ease in the faces of his sitters that reads as genuine trust, the product of a man who was known to everyone in the valley, who shared their poverty and their daily rhythms, and who had an instinct for putting people at ease that no amount of formal training could have manufactured.

Two children read under a large tree, while a person with a basket walks behind them. The scene feels serene and shaded by foliage.

The Fotostiftung Schweiz, which mounted a major exhibition of his work in 2016, described this as a quality of complicity between photographer and subject. The people didn't dissimulate, as the exhibition notes put it. They simply were, and Donetta caught them being it.

His range was wide. He photographed children buried in leaves up to their necks as a game. He photographed men in their Sunday clothes gathered for a game of bocce outside a trattoria. He photographed a cook holding up an enormous fish with the quiet pride of a man who has caught something significant. He photographed pig slaughterings in the snow, wedding couples against painted backdrops, women gathered for funerals in their darkest clothes. He photographed himself, repeatedly, in self-portraits that show a man who understood framing and light and the way a face could be made to carry meaning.

He was, in other words, an artist who happened to be selling seeds.

A group of people in vintage attire gather outdoors with a bicycle, enjoying drinks. Children in dresses are present, and a barrel marked "S.P." is on display.

The Chocolate Factory

One of the most celebrated images in the Donetta archive is a group portrait of female workers posed outside the Cima Norma chocolate factory in Dangio-Torre, in the valley itself. The factory had been founded in 1903 by the Cima brothers, originally from Dangio but based in Nice, where they had made their money in the chocolate trade. Bringing industrial chocolate production back to the Blenio Valley was an act of economic modernisation for a region that had always exported its people rather than its products.

Five women in vintage dresses, two seated with hand on chin, three standing holding flowers, against a plain wall. Serious expressions. — Workers in Front of the Chocolate Factory Cima-Norma, Dangio-Torre

Donetta's photograph of the workers is a masterpiece of compositional intelligence. The figures are arranged with infinite care: two seated women on the left with their legs crossed in opposite directions, both resting their faces in their hands; a central figure upright; two women on the right angled toward each other. The line of the image shifts in height as it moves across the frame, creating a rhythm that feels alive rather than posed. It's a document of the valley's first encounter with industrial modernity, and it's also simply a beautiful picture of women who trusted the man with the camera.

The Cima Norma factory ran until 1968. The building still stands in Dangio-Torre, and has since become the site of an art festival that continues to invoke Donetta's photographs of the workers who made chocolate there a century ago.

Children partially hidden among large leaves in a forest setting. A stone structure in the background. Monochrome, serene mood.

Chef in a white uniform and hat holds a large fish by a rustic wall. A bucket and chair are nearby, creating a vintage culinary scene.

Loss Upon Loss

By 1912, Donetta's family circumstances had collapsed entirely. His wife Teodolinda left him and took six of their seven children with her, moving to France in search of better prospects. One child stayed. Donetta was left alone in the valley with his camera and his debts.

A bride and groom pose in front of a patterned backdrop. The bride holds a bouquet, wearing a veil and floral headdress, both smiling.

Around the same time, on or near his 46th birthday, all of his possessions were seized by creditors. This included his beloved glass plate camera. How he continued to photograph after this point is not fully documented, but he did. He acquired or borrowed equipment somehow and kept going, living out his final years in the Casserio of Corzoneso, a former circular stone schoolhouse that had been closed when the number of local children fell too low to justify keeping it open. The building became his home, his darkroom, and his archive.

A family poses outside a stone wall; a man, woman with baskets, seated girl holding a cat, boy with a lamb. Rustic, old-fashioned scene.

He lamented the changes the modern world was bringing to the valley. As roads were built and railway lines extended into the mountains, the isolation that had defined the Blenio Valley for centuries began to dissolve. Donetta, who had built his entire practice on that isolation and the community it had produced, watched it change with a melancholy that surfaces in some of his later work.

When he died in 1932, he owed money to many of the local people who had extended him credit over the years. His possessions were auctioned to settle what debts could be settled. The glass plate negatives, all 5,000 of them, were assessed as having no value. They were left in the attic of the local parish building in Corzoneso and forgotten.

The Rediscovery

The plates survived by luck. Had they been stored anywhere less sheltered, or had the building been renovated or demolished in the intervening decades, they would have been lost. Instead, they sat untouched through the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and most of the 1970s, the glass slowly accumulating dust in a valley that was slowly accumulating tarmac roads and electric lights.

A family of five poses outside a rustic stone house. Parents seated with one child on lap, two boys stand beside them. Mood is serious.

In the 1980s, a local woman named Mariarosa Bozzini discovered the collection in the attic. The Commune of Corzoneso, which effectively owned the archive by default, began to understand what it had. But the plates had never been developed. Every image Donetta had made was locked inside the glass, unexposed to any eye since the moment he had taken it.

Four people outdoors in snow, one holding a hanging pig, others observing. Rustic house and leafless trees in the background. Somber mood.

In 1993, a photographer named Alberto Flammer developed the plates for the first time. What appeared in the developing trays were images taken between roughly 1900 and 1930, portraits and scenes from a world that had ceased to exist, seen now for the very first time by anyone other than their maker. That year, the first exhibition of Donetta's work was mounted in Switzerland.

Boy in 1920s suit and hat stands in front of a painted backdrop, outdoors with stone wall. Serious expression. Monochrome image.

A second major solo exhibition followed in 2016 at the Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur, showing around 120 works from the archive, many of them seen publicly for the first time. The Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles subsequently presented his work outside Switzerland for the first time, drawing a comparison between Donetta's intimate relationship with his valley and Van Gogh's intense engagement with the landscape of Provence. It was, the Arles catalogue observed, the relationship of an artist who cannot leave his subject, not because he lacks the means, but because the subject is everything.

What He Left Behind

The Roberto Donetta Foundation now operates from his former home in Corzoneso, the old circular schoolhouse where he spent his last years. The archive is preserved there, and the foundation continues to promote and research his work. The photographic collection is also held at the Museo di Val Blenio.

Child walking with a metal drum covering their body on a cobblestone path. Shadow and textured ground visible, with a fence in the background.

Donetta belongs to a particular tradition of self-taught outsider photographers who documented the lives of ordinary people with a rigour and humanity that the formal art world of their time had no framework to accommodate.

His contemporaries in this respect include Jacob Riis, whose photographs of New York tenement life in the 1880s and 1890s changed housing law, and later figures like Diane Arbus, whose unflinching portraits of marginalised Americans redrew the boundaries of documentary photography. What connects them is a willingness to look directly at people who were otherwise looked away from, and to find in those faces something worth preserving.

A family of five posing outdoors against a rustic backdrop with vines. The father holds a newspaper. Mood appears solemn. Black and white.

Donetta did this in a Swiss Alpine valley with a plate camera, a bag of seeds, and no money. He photographed a world that was already disappearing while he walked through it, and he did it with such care and precision that sixty years after his death, when the images finally appeared for the first time, they looked as though they had been taken yesterday.

He died owing money. He is now considered one of Switzerland's great photographers. These two facts are not as contradictory as they might seem. The valley couldn't afford to pay him what he was worth. It turned out it couldn't afford to lose what he made either.