An Attic Full of Trains

Carlotta di Lenardo grew up visiting her grandparents' house in Italy, where a hidden door tucked among the library bookshelves opened into an attic dominated by an enormous model railway her grandfather Alberto had built and expanded over decades. It was only later that he revealed a second, quieter obsession: a personal archive of more than 8,000 photographs made across a lifetime of travel and everyday life, entirely unknown outside the family and never intended for exhibition. Carlotta took on the job of sequencing that archive into a book, and the result is a loosely chronological portrait of the twentieth century as lived by one restless, curious amateur photographer, moving across Italy, the United States, Brazil, Morocco, and Greece.

Alberto di Lenardo had no formal training and no ambitions of gallery representation, which gives the pictures an unguarded, diaristic quality that critics have compared to Vivian Maier's rediscovered street photography, though the mood here leans warmer and more domestic than urban. Reviewers in The Guardian and the Financial Times have praised its casual, confident color sense and its resemblance to the work of Luigi Ghirri and Guido Guidi.