Lisetta Carmi: Suonare Forte

An exhibition dedicated to the great Italian photographer Lisetta Carmi, who passed away in the summer of 2022. A survivor of racial persecution, Carmi turned the camera into a tool for understanding the world and the human condition while at the same time finding answers about herself and soothing her existential anguish. Evoked in her shots are her training as a pianist but also her courage to change direction, to take different paths, to follow her stubborn will to give voice to the last.
180 photographs taken during two decades of his professional life between the 1960s and 1970s offer a cross-section of his most important photographic projects. There are nine sections in the exhibition, including one dedicated to the theme of work: images of the dramatic conditions of workers in the Port of Genoa, young female workers in the cork factory in Calangianus, Sardinia, and the figure of women as protagonists in the series of raw and disturbing shots. Ample space is devoted to work composed over six years of assiduous association with the transvestite community, from 1965 to 1971, in Genoa’s historic center, with which Carmi asserts the right of every individual to determine his or her own gender identity.
The exhibition also includes the previously unseen section devoted to the Florence flood of November 1966.