“Very close, incredibly far” is the title of the exhibition with which Palazzo Ducale in Genoa celebrates the photographic art of Lisetta Carmi (Genoa 15 February 1924 - Cisternino Brindisi 5 July 2022).
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Genoese artist and photographer, who throughout her life had the courage to travel different paths giving voice to the least fortunate, this great exhibition is presented, which aims to be a journey that starts from Genoa and Italy to tell, with her lucid and sharp gaze, distant realities, worlds in transformation, with unpublished images in color, which accompany the more famous ones in black and white.
For Lisetta Carmi, travel is not only a tool for discovery, but a process of personal transformation. She took her first shots in Puglia with a small Agfa Silette camera, using nine rolls of film to document beautiful and interesting places.
In Puglia, Lisetta Carmi is fascinated by traditions, so deeply rooted that they try to compose a marginal reality that does not want to conform to the progress that is appearing. Her subjects will be the trulli, the elderly women engaged in traditional artisanal work, the streets. There is a constant attention on the part of Lisetta Carmi for the communities of the outskirts. Carmi, photographing men in the street proud of their clothing and elderly women in their traditional clothes, documents the life of isolated rural communities, far from tourist stereotypes.
Lisetta Carmi was born into a wealthy middle-class Jewish family on February 15, 1924 and, due to the racial laws, was forced to abandon Italy for Switzerland, returning in 1945 and graduating from the Milan Conservatory. In the following years she held concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Israel, but in 1960 she interrupted her concert career and casually approached photography, transforming it into a real profession. After having carried out a large investigation on the port of Genoa in 1964, which later became a traveling exhibition, she continued her reportage on Sardinia, which she began in 1962 and then finished in the Seventies. In 1971 she bought a trullo in Puglia in Cisternino and on March 12, 1976 she met Babaj Herakhan Baba, the Mahavatar of the Himalayas, in Jaipur, India, an encounter that would radically transform her life. Over the years he created a series of portraits of artists and personalities from the world of culture of the time, including Judith Malina, Joris Ivens, Charles Aznavour, Edoardo Sanguineti, Leonardo Sciascia, Lucio Fontana, César, Carmelo Bene, Luigi Nono, Luigi Dallapiccola, Claudio Abbado, Jacques Lacan and Ezra Pound, of whom we remember the famous shots taken in 1966 at the poet's home on the heights of Zoagli, in Liguria.
Lisetta Carmi did not only travel in Italy but, between the 1967s and XNUMXs, she also reached Israel, a country that she felt particularly close to, being of Jewish origin. She documented the complexity of a society halfway between the Westernization of the new generations and the tradition of the Orthodox world. In Palestine, in XNUMX, she took an unpublished shot that portrayed a little girl on the street, barefoot, dragging an undone schoolbag. Her small colored dress is perhaps a sign of hope and modernization.
The exhibition was curated by Giovanni Battista Martini, curator of the Lisetta Carmi archive, who has conceived numerous exhibitions in recent years, and by Ilaria Bonacossa, curator of contemporary art and director of Palazzo Ducale in Genoa.
The exhibition is promoted and organized by Palazzo Ducale Foundation for Culture Genoa and Civita Mostre e Musei.
