A disturbing look into how German and Italian dictatorships of the 1930s utilized photography, film, and exhibitions-and how modern rallies aren't much different.

Daily Beast, 'Power of Photography'

This is, unfortunately, a time when it is urgent to analyze and pay attention to what this propaganda was and how its strategies operated effectively. I am grateful to art historian and photo historian Vanessa Rocco for doing a key slice of that work in her compelling, well-researched book.

This rigorous historical work is timely: the rise of authoritarianism, the deflation of democracy, the mobilization of prejudice, while pushing measures unhealthy for the planet and for human well-being,
demand consideration [and] Rocco does not hesitate to underline that the legacy of right-wing propaganda's simultaneous messages of domination, belonging, and exclusion continues today.

Rocco's work also focuses on the mediums of photography, film, exhibition, and the use
of photo and film in exhibitions. This international mass culture focus, I believe, will make it useful for teaching, as it invites comparisons between uses of international mass media for coercive propaganda then and now-and urges close looking at both.

Afterimage, Vol. 49, Number 4

Vanessa Rocco's Photofascism is an outstanding achievement: a theoretically sophisticated and analytically compelling exposé of the way that the Italian and German dictatorships exploited exhibition culture in order to secure mass loyalty. Today, moreover, in light of fascism's return, Rocco's insights have assumed an uncanny contemporary relevance.

Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor of History and Comparative Literature, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA

Photofascism provides a fascinating, timely, and theoretically rich analysis of the photographic exhibition as a potent piece of the twentieth-century fascist propaganda machine. Rocco has written a historically and geographically grounded study with compelling implications for contemporary society.

Dolores Flamiano, Professor, James Madison University School of Media Arts & Design, USA

Rocco's study represents a timely addition to the consolidated literature on photography as a means of seductive political persuasion and the monumental staging of power in interwar Europe.

Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Professor of Art History, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, USA

Rocco delineates a history of the fascist exhibition spaces of spectacle in the 1930s and emphasizes just how much the mediums of photography and film have been engaged to enhance false narratives. Her extensive research provides a history for the way that photo-based imagery has been - and still is - engineered to immerse us in spectacle until we can no longer see the ideological water in which we swim.

Lisa Jaye Young, ArtPulse