Lisetta Carmi

Critical text

Lisetta Carmi (b. 1924, Genoa) is known to the public for the series of photographs she brought together in 1972 in the book ‘I Travestiti’, a powerful reportage on the community of transsexual people in the former Jewish ghetto in Genoa. The book originally contained only the works in black and white, but more recently those in colour have also been printed. They clearly reveal her empathy for a world that was totally rejected by society at the time, as well as her feelings for, and interest in, the most marginalised people and settings, as can be seen in most of her projects.  Before this particular work, Lisetta Carmi had photographed people’s living conditions in the south of Italy, in Puglia and Sardinia in particular, but also the hospitals in Genoa, and the city’s sewers, as well as the dockworkers in the port of her native city. The graphic work she devoted to Luigi Dallapiccola’s ‘Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera’ in 1962 was an experiment that took inspiration from her training as a pianist. Each of the eleven pieces that make up the composer’s work is accompanied by a related ‘photographic mark’ formed by scratches that she made directly on the negative after it was blackened by exposure to light. In 1976 she abandoned her photographic work and devoted herself to meditation.

Text by Lorenzo Giusti