“TAll my life I have worked to understand », she told of herself, already old. Rebel, nonconformist, unique. An existence that lasted 98 years, completed in February, always “in the sign of the last” and for “give voice to those who do not have it“.
Farewell to Lisetta Carmi
Lisetta Carmi there is no more since yesterday and the world of photography, but not only, one of its most sensitive representatives weeps. Her body leaves this Earth, but her body will always remain an archive of isurprising, human, harsh, courageous, luminous images.
All possible lives
Persecuted by fascism when she was a student and exile in Switzerland. And then the concert careertherefore, with 1960 the first turning point, when you discover, self-taught, photography and made it a profession, abruptly abandoning the pianoto throw oneself with an impetuous passion in the story of the lives of the least.
From the trans of via del Campo in Genoa to the work of the workers
With a Leika given by his father, Carmi begins to document the work of workers, the humiliated lives of the transgender community who inhabited the ancient Jewish ghetto in its Genoaright where there is the way of Field of Fabrizio de André. Images that become the subject of a volume of images that cannot be found today.
And then there Sardinia during the Candelarìa, the great festival that is celebrated on New Year’s Eve in Orgosolo, in the interior of the Region. The shooting focuses on women in prayer, typical architecture, the shepherds in their folds on the Supramonte and much more. It’s still the horror of the most extreme poverty in Venezueladocumenting the desperation of the many busy collecting something to sell in landfills.
Travels and discoveries
These are years of discoveries, battles, travels: in Israel, Palestine, South America, Afghanistan. Without forgetting the many portraits of artists and intellectuals, some remained legendary, such as that of poet Ezra Pound already old, which will be worth the prestigious Nièpce Award.
Lisetta Carmi and the silence of meditation
A huge, highly concentrated job. She herself, only a short time ago, said: “In 18 years I have done what you do in 50», Happy with the recent rediscovery of her shots, with many exhibitions that have paid homage to her. But along with all this ferment, there was also silence and meditation, that umpteenth life he had chosen at the end of the seventies after the dazzling encounter, in India, with the yogi master Babaji Herakhan Baba.
Yet another turning point, in which Carmi is dedicated to set up a place of spirituality in Puglia, in Cisternino, where he had bought a trullo and where he will live almost fifty years of his very long life. Until yesterday. “I want to be cremated and then scattered at sea, no grave for me,” she said. And the last message from her, it was she who pointed it out: “Always remember to think of others“.
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