Secondo Pia

Who was Secondo Pia?

Secondo Pia was an Italian lawyer and amateur photographer. He is best known for taking the first photographs of the Shroud of Turin on May 28, 1898 and, when he was developing them, noticing that the photographic negatives showed a clearer rendition of the image. The image he obtained from the shroud has been approved by the Roman Catholic Church as part of the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus.

Pia was born in Asti, Piemonte, and although he was an attorney, he was interested in both art and science and as of the early 1870s began to explore the new technology of photography. In the 1890s he was a city councillor and a member of Turin's Amateur Photographers' Club. He was a well known photographer in Turin and examples of his other photographs are now part of the historical collection at the Turin Cinema Museum. He can also be considered a pioneer in the field of photography for using electric lightbulbs in the 1890s, given that lightbulbs were a novelty in the late nineteenth century, with Thomas Edison's reliable incandescent light bulb having been invented only in 1879.