Crossing the Image. Women and Photography between the 1950s and the 1980s is dedicated to 13 women photographers, both Italian and international, who worked in the social sphere, focusing their attention on foundational themes such as labor, folk tradition, politics, war, architecture, literature, and culture in the broadest sense. The one examined is a long period of political, social, carrier engagement in the history of the twentieth century, a century that marked great changes in which women were protagonists. The selection of photographs in the exhibition starts, chronologically, from some anthropologically based research from the late 1950s to the 1960s, which marked a radical change in culture and society, the attainment of individual freedoms and democratic achievements. Achievements that the 1970s would take to extremes, animating, against a backdrop of dramatic conflicts, the relationship between politics and culture. The 1980s, at least in our country, constituted the time of the ebb. The great battles waged for civil rights, for the emancipation of certain social classes, of women, of the marginalized, flowed toward different ways of experiencing existence, supplanting the collective practices, of which art, photography had made themselves interpreters, in favor of the individual dimension.
The exhibition also chronicles distant worlds, from Palestine to South Africa, from Cambodia to the United States, through war reports and accounts of everyday life that record the major historical and political events of the period between the 1970s and 1980s.
Crossing the Image traces this long history through works that are now recognized and acclaimed and others that, on the other hand, have not been given the proper visibility or understanding and, in some ways, have been forgotten. We try here to reread them in a different, more structured light, taking into account the role that these photographs have played within civil society. A role, more or less conscious, that today we begin to look at with the right tools to give them a different meaning, in the light of history, of memory, of what is happening day by day.

Medal of the President of the Republic

Edited by.
Angela Madesani

Organizers

UDI’s Women’s Biennial Committee (composed of Lola G. Bonora, Silvia Cirelli, Ada Patrizia Fiorillo, Catalina Golban, Elisa Leonini, Anna Quarzi, Ansalda Siroli, Dida Spano, Liviana Zagagnoni) and Art Museum Service in collaboration with Ferrara Art Foundation, with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region and the patronage of the Ministry of Culture, Art and Tourism.
Exhibition realized thanks to the support of Assicoop, Coop Alleanza 3.0 and Copma