Lisetta Carmi, the student expelled from school because she was Jewish, the photographer born a pianist finding in the instrument “her only companion”, tells about herself in a scheduled exhibition from 22 September to 22 January at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin.
The Intesa Sanpaolo museum will host the large monographic exhibition dedicated to one of the most interesting personalities on the Italian photographic scene who recently passed away at the age of 98.
Calangianus – cork factory, 1964 | Courtesy @ Lisetta Carmi-Martini & Ronchetti
Curated by Giovanni Battista Martini, with a precious video contribution made for the occasion by Alice Rohrwacher, the path Lisetta Carmi. Play Loud it evokes the formation of Carmi as a pianist, underlining the courage to change direction, to undertake different paths to follow his stubborn desire to give voice to the least. On the other hand Lisetta Carmi approaches photography in 1960 thanks to her musicologist friend Leo Levi, who invites her to follow him in Puglia, where the scholar would have recorded the songs of the Jewish community of San Nicandro Garganico. For the occasion, Carmi buys her first camera, Agfa Silette with nine rolls of film, to capture the experiences of that journey in photos, attracted by the light of Salento.
Back in Genoa, she developed her photographs, receiving many appreciations and therefore deciding to pursue a career as a photographer, soon establishing herself as one of the leading interpreters of social photography in the second half of the twentieth century.
“As in music, in my photos there is rhythm, the rhythm of the music that I have studied for 35 years” he wrote. And again “I have never looked for subjects (…) they came to meet me, because when my soul vibrates together with the subject, with the person I see, then I shoot”.
Lisetta Carmi, Ezra Pound, 1966 © Lisetta Carmi – Martini & Ronchetti
In Turin the eight sections of the exhibition itinerary they will restore this rhythm, both of music and of life, welcoming beyond 150 shots taken between the sixties and seventies. The extraordinary reportage on the world of transvestites published in the seventies in a book that has now become a cult, with black and white and color images, gives way to the series of childbirth, to photographs dedicated to the world of work in Italy, to the sequence of the meeting with Ezra Pound. Playing a fundamental role in the exhibition is the music that peeps through the modern technologies of directional sound diffusion that allow you to listen to songs by Luigi Nono and Luigi Dallapiccola.
Lisetta Carmi herself, who has dedicated twenty years of her life to photography, putting human beings at the center of her research, moved by a deep empathy and the desire to understand, will tell some of her works through short videos.
Lisetta Carmi, Sicily, 1977 © Lisetta Carmi – Martini & Ronchetti
A public program will deepen and develop the themes of the exhibition, while a program of meetings entitled #INSIDEwith free access, (scheduled for Wednesday at 18.30) will see the participation of experts and professionals who will share ideas and reflections with the public during the evening opening days of the museum.
The exhibition can be visited on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 9.30 to 19.30; Wednesday from 9.30 to 22.30. Last admission one and a half hours before closing.
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