Lisetta Carmi at Palazzo Ducale

Lisetta Carmi at the Palazzo Ducale, from 23 October 2024 to 30 March 2025, the exhibition “Very Close, Incredibly Far”, a major new event featuring the renowned photographer.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Lisetta Carmi’s birth, a major exhibition dedicated to the Genoese artist and photographer will take place. Throughout her life, she had the courage to follow different paths, giving a voice, first and foremost, to the marginalised. It is a journey that begins in Genoa and Italy, capturing scenes with her sharp eye, and then moves on to distant realities and worlds in transformation, featuring previously unseen colour images alongside her most famous black-and-white series.

A captivating exhibition

Notable among the highlights are the images from the Transvestites series from the 1960s, which were published in 1972, causing a sensation and influencing the photographic exploration of many international artists. The Lisetta Carmi exhibition at Palazzo Ducale includes not only black-and-white photography but also colour works. This features the previously unseen series Eroticism and Authoritarianism at Staglieno, where the famous Genoese cemetery is transformed through the photographer’s lens. The result is a portrait of 19th-century bourgeois society and the eroticism intertwined with funerary monuments.

Lisetta Carmi at Palazzo Ducale, biography

She was born in Genoa on 15 February 1924, into an affluent Jewish middle-class family. However, due to the racial laws, she was forced to leave school in 1938 and seek refuge in Switzerland with her family. In 1945, at the end of the war, she returned to Italy and graduated from the Milan Conservatory. In 1960, she ended her concert career and, by chance, turned to photography, making it her true profession. On 12 March 1976, she met Babaji Herakhan Baba, the Mahavatar of the Himalayas, in Jaipur, India. This encounter would profoundly change her life.

The Great Portraits

Over the years, she created a series of portraits of artists and cultural figures of the time. These included Judith Malina, Joris Ivens, Charles Aznavour, Edoardo Sanguineti, Leonardo Sciascia, and Lucio Fontana. Also among her subjects were Carmelo Bene, Luigi Nono, Luigi Dallapiccola, Claudio Abbado, Jacques Lacan, and Ezra Pound. Notably, her famous photographs of Pound, taken in 1966 at the poet’s home in Zoagli, are particularly remembered. Lisetta Carmi passed away—or as she would have said, left her earthly body—on 5 July 2022 in Cisternino.