When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
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In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
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These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
.jpg)
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
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Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
Make sure to check in with the gowithYamo app when you visit!
When, in 1960, popular demonstrations took place in Genoa against the neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, Lisetta Carmi was eager to take part. As a qualified pianist and successful concert performer, her piano teacher tried to dissuade her, fearing a career-ending injury. With resolve, she replied: ‘If my hands are more important than humanity, I’ll give up playing’.
Carmi (1924-2022) soon turned her hand from playing the piano to photography; a marked shift from an individual, isolated activity to her socially engaged practice on the streets. These two things – a resistance against conventional authority, and a drive to participate – colour her monochrome photographs, social documents ‘free from rhetoric or sentimentality’, and rigorous in their objective.
Self-taught, with no formal education, Carmi is most celebrated in Italy for the Port of Genoa (1964), a series remarkably produced just two years after taking up her practice. Published in magazines and books, she almost exclusively worked in series, providing many perspectives on a single subject or concern. Such plurality permeates her practice and biography, her many lives reflected in Identities, the final exhibition in the Estorick Collection’s 25th anniversary celebrations - and their best yet.
Outside of Italy - and at Frieze London 2023, in a collaboration between Galleria Martini & Ronchetti and Ciaccia Levi - Carmi is best known for I travestiti (1965-1971), her ‘sensitive chronicling’ of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s. But Estorick’s exhibition opens with her primary interest, labour, and both the industrial infrastructures and individual workers of Italy. Carmi’s political inclinations are clear; both small fishing boats and cruise liners passing through the port are represented with the same dignity and respect, both (if unequal) crucial to the local economy.
In their black-and-white, Carmi’s images are both compositionally and visually striking. She often shoots from above, but always seems to be on the same level as her subjects, perhaps using her high vantage point to highlight the inequalities between them and the society which subjugates or ignores them. The port was a place hidden in plain sight; surrounded by a wall, all Italians knew their wealth came from there but could not, or chose not, to engage with those working within it.
Carmi’s practice was radical; working in an area closed to the general public, especially women, she would arrive at five in the morning and pretend to be a docker’s relative to gain access. Her interests were also a family affair. Carmi’s brother Eugenio, a painter and designer, worked as an artistic consultant for Genoa’s Italsider steelworks, the subject of her more ‘spectacular and dangerous’ photographs, of the pouring of molten metal.
These circular works recall her contemporary Maurice Broomfield’s dramatic depictions of English factories and workers in a period of rapid economic transition, recently displayed at the V&A. But whilst Broomfield’s Industrial Sublime was heavily staged, often leaning into a sentimental nostalgia for northern England, Carmi’s photographs are completely realistic, showing, not telling.
Carmi’s self-professed interest in ‘things of strength’ never conflicts with her effort to highlight the difficult working conditions of stevedores, enduring long hours, and often handling chemicals like phosphate without protective equipment. She also depicted the first women to be employed by the Calangianus cork factory in Sardinia, again placing them in their context to the viewer. The contrast between the individual worker, and the stacked slats of cork produced by their collective work, highlights their relationship with wider society – which was economically dependent on their labour for exports but refused to acknowledge them as equal.
Carmi’s I travestiti continues this principle of forcing the viewer to bear witness to marginalised individuals and confront a society ‘no longer capable of seeing people’. Catalogue author (and contributor to the curation) Paola Rosina suggests that these individuals – and Carmi’s images - were marginalised then because they expose something within and about ourselves, that we fear. But the ignorance of these experiences was more convenient too, a kind of banal exploitation. Indeed, members of the LGBTQ+ community were pushed into Genoa’s Jewish ghetto, poor quality houses owned by the wealthy, who knew of their condition, but also the prospects for economic exploitation. Those who could afford to would travel to Casablanca, in Morocco, for gender-affirmation surgery. Many more swallowed hormones, or melted wax, to make do.
Carmi was clear not to reproduce or capitalise upon inequality, only publishing with consent, which was often denied by those fearing the risk to their lives and families in other cities. Her images were controversial; she didn’t sell a single photograph at the time, often deemed a ‘dirty girl’ for photographing these communities at all.
Carmi’s works remained ignored by all but a small number of cognoscenti (experts), a stark contrast with their status today. Even here, the curation goes beyond, showing rare 1960s colour images made possible with the discovery of slides in her archive back in 2017. They provide another glimpse into her practice, how she shot in both colour and black-and-white at the same time, by alternating between her Leica, Nikon, and Rolleiflex cameras.
More importantly, they also relocate their subjects, forced to live in the shadows, in their contemporary context, and the colour of the 1960s. It’s a legacy that endures today, and transnationally; take the bright visuals and classical and Baroque references of TRAVESÍA TRAVESTI (Travesti Odyssey), a Chilean film about LGBTQ+ communities in South America, recently screened in London by Cinema Mentiré.
Carmi photographed to understand, often, ‘how backward Italy was at the time’, even after the global youth protests of 1968. In I travestiti, its contradictions are laid bare, in the presence of laws that criminalised cross-dressing until 1980s, but not homosexuality. Her practice was born out of personal experience; she often (lightly) suggested she wanted to be a man as a child, like her brothers, but her practice challenged her own prejudices of a gender binary too. ‘There are no such thing as men and women, there are human beings,’ she says, ‘no obligatory behaviour models outside of those of an authoritarian tradition that is imposed upon us from childhood’.
The curation subtly respects her agency – speaking of how she ‘reinvented herself’ and, as an older woman, ‘enjoyed recalling’ her youth – without nostalgic reminiscence. Instead, it is framed as a life of change, but guided by resolve. Aged six, she had decided that she never wanted to marry, because she never wanted anyone to tell her what to do.
As a photographer, Carmi will always be recognised by her subjects. Still, Identities includes a series of filmed interviews with one of her curators which allows us to hear Carmi, in all her individual complexity, in her own words. Batista Martini and Roberto Lacarbonara reflect this too, in keeping the ‘controversial’, or contemporary to the time, phrase I travestiti untranslated.
After a lifetime of challenging conventional authority, Carmi eventually ‘withdrew from the world’ again in 1979, to the ashram she founded in Puglia. She calls this her ‘sixth life’ – the co-curator, her ‘third’ – but really, it’s coming full circle. Puglia was where Carmi had undertaken her first photographic project with an ethnomusicologist, long before her friend Mahavatar Babaji convinced her to fund a new project in southern Italy. A place of both meditation and education, which welcomed interdisciplinary knowledge and agronomists from Japan, Carmi adored learning from children and younger people.
The notion of ‘withdrawal’ posited in the curation is too simple; Carmi was merely disconnecting with one world - of authority, market structures, and perhaps too photography – which she had always found problematic; indeed, it was at the point that the ashram was recognised as a non-profit foundation by the Italian government that she decided her work with the ashram was done and left. Nor did she shy from transnational comparisons, likening the working conditions she witnessed in Italian factories to life in the ‘Third World’.
Identities neither extends to nor critically engages with her travels in Venezuela, Israel, Northern Ireland, and India – where Babaji had people touch her feet and behold her as a white woman from Europe. On the former, Carmi suggests Maracaibo as a particular highlight in her practice, and a continuation of her efforts to documenting the lives of the ‘poor’. Her complexity extends to her philosophical understanding of freedoms: ‘The children of the poor laugh much more…They are more free, not locked in their houses, like the children of the rich’.
Carmi’s self-professed ‘interest in everything’ was, in part, a product of her exclusion from school at the age of fourteen. Born in Genoa into a middle-class Jewish family, she was forced to leave school by the Racial Laws introduced by Mussolini's Fascist regime in 1938 and found solace in studying the piano at home. From Genoa, the family would eventually flee to Zurich until the end of World War II.
‘I rushed to cultures’, Carmi gestures to her room full of books, which, alongside her devoted interest, no doubt informed the interdisciplinarity which marks out her practice. Carmi’s first commission was for a theatre company; Rosina remarks upon the musical ‘rhythm’ of her series and compositions. Still, her lack of formal education remained a point of insecurity until her later years, at which point she recalled a friend’s comments: ‘You know a thousand times more than those who went to university, because you have a love for culture, a love for understanding what human beings have done, and that’s my wealth.’
The film also offers glimpses into her wider body of work, an archive which extends far beyond the Estorick’s two rooms. In twelve photographs published in 1966, Carmi claims to have captured the plural aspects of Ezra Pound better than all the articles ever written about him. Certainly, there’s scope for more on the relationship between the Jewish photographer and the fascist poet.
We also see works unpublished, or censured. In Eroticism and Authoritarianism in the Monumental Cemetery, Staglieno (1960s), Carmi again sought to challenge authority, critiquing the excess, and continued glorification, of nineteenth-century elite graves and burials. Italian publishers wouldn’t take it, claiming they’d lose half of their readership, reinforcing the conservative, pro-authority nature of Italian society at the time. The series was eventually published in Switzerland.
Carmi’s interest in death sits comfortably alongside that of birth. Il Parto (The Delivery) (1968) documents the very moment of childbirth; ‘Tak!’, she remarks on her luck, at capturing the popping of a baby’s head from her position between its mother’s legs. Her photographs are typically absent of sentimentality, of smiling women, or babies wrapped in pink and blue; these ‘graphic’ depictions lay bare the beauty of natural labour, of humanity.
Carmi’s claim that she rushed to photograph ‘every important thing’ cannot be contested. Her restless interest resulted in a prolific output, in her words producing 50 years of archive in just eighteen years of practice. But the important is the important thing; she photographed only when - and because - she had something to say and was scathingly critical of the ‘ti ti ti’ of mass, meaningless photography.
Unsurprising, then, that Carmi decided her final life would be silence. Disinterested in money, or fame, she consented to exhibitions, only insofar as they brought attention to the social and political issues of her subjects. Today, her works are increasingly acquired by national institutions in Italy, and more modern art museums than photography ones. In some ways, it’s an inversion of her intent, for she clearly considered her practice closer to photojournalism – reportage or editorial work – than visual art. Indeed, it’s questionable whether she would consider (or restrict) herself as an artist.
Such questions, and new research, matter for many reasons. Some of her works have been lost – the original Port of Genoa prints, somewhere in Russia – or excluded from archives. More importantly, generative research can navigate problems of recreation, and posthumous consent. Though Carmi consciously left her archive in Genoa a few years before her death, she also refused other re-engagements. The photographer refused to republish I travestiti; just one copy can be found in the Tate Library, collected following a reference from Martin Parr. Her estate responded with a new book of colour prints and, for this exhibition, a truly wonderful catalogue which devotes great double-page spreads to the photographs.
Carmi’s first UK museum show comes posthumously, with the photographer passing away last year at the age of 98. So too, at a time when her European contemporaries are increasingly acknowledged in mainstream institutions; we might see parallels in her editorial work in cities with Evelyn Hofer, in her quiet resistance to authoritarianism, with Markéta Luskačová, whose groundbreaking works will travel from Stills in Edinburgh to London’s Centre for British Photography in 2024, the artist’s 80th birthday year.
Rather than spark comparisons, her recent death only reinforces the importance of representing older women artists, and without singularity or nostalgia. ‘She looks very sweet. She’s not.’ Rosina bluntly remarks, but it’s evident to any who sits with her that she was no ‘nice old lady’. Carmi was someone with interest and intent, whose century-spanning practice deserves even more focus.
Lisetta Carmi: Identities is on view at the Estorick Collection in London until 17 December 2023.
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