The Photography of Prof. Marco Nobili

In 2017 I stumbled upon a collection of old film slides in an antiques store in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. After some brief rummaging through the slides en situ, I purchased as much of the collection as I could afford. It’s not the first time I’ve purchased someone else’s old film, but it is the first time that I’ve felt as though I had happened upon something of a treasure. I regret not being able to purchase the entire collection, but at the time money was tight and the shop owner firm on their price – upon contacting them several weeks later, I was told the rest had been sold to persons unknown.

I immediately began digitising the collection, and discovered the photographs I did manage to purchase were fantastic, spanning several decades and multiple continents. In tandem I began to look for clues on whose collection I had purchased, finding only the signature of “Nobili” in the lower corner of a scan of a single architectural drawing included in the slides. It took many months to track down the photographer. Here’s what I found out:

Professors Marco and Louise Nobili were educators at Wayne State University for decades. According to his obituary, Marco was born in Milan, Italy “to an Italian father and French mother both members of the Aristocracy […] He earned his Ph.D. in engineering and architecture, served in the Italian and American Armed Forces in WWII, [and] assisted Yamasaki in the designing of the State Capitol building in Lansing. […] He was Knighted by the French government and was awarded the “Plumes Academiques“.

According to her obituary, Louise “did her undergraduate work at Wayne State and completed her graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin and the Art Institute of Chicago. Mrs. Nobili began teaching at Wayne State in 1944 and retired in 1983. […] She exhibited her paintings and constructed reliefs in such prestigious sites as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum. She received numerous awards, including one that purchased one of her paintings for the permanent collection of the Detroit museum.1978 Interview with Louise (courtesy of Smithsonian)

The more I discovered about the Nobilis, the more my attachment to these photos grew. Being a half-Italian photographer who moved to the US myself, there were some fundamental parallels that began to emerge. As I scanned more of the slides, I found we not only had some shared heritage; many of the photos were strikingly similar to my own work. For lack of better words, we shared an eye when it came to street and travel photography.

There are hundreds of slides that I have still to scan, and the project has been on hold for a few years as they remained in storage in the US after I moved back to Italy. This year I will have the opportunity to retrieve them, and begin again the lengthy but exciting process of digitising each one.

I will continue to update this page in order to create a permanent home for them on the internet.


If you are a surviving family member of Professors Marco or Louise Nobili (Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Wayne State University, Michigan State University) I would be very eager to talk to you. I have hundreds of family slides that I would like give you.

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