Women in history, the three lives of Lisetta Carmi

Lisetta Carmi was born in Genoa on 15 February 1924in via Sturla, where he lives together with two older brothers, Eugenio and Marcello, in a wealthy family of Jewish origins. She died, almost a hundred years old, in Cisternino on 5 July 2022not far fromBole Baba ashram that she herself had founded to spread the message of his Indian master Shri Babaji Haidakhandi Mahadeva. A message that can be summarized in three words: truth, simplicity, love. It was he who told her: “You will live five lives.”

Lisetta Carmi’s early life: the piano

Maybe there weren’t five, but there were many lives crossed by Annalisa Cesarina Carmi, better known as Lisetta. The common thread of her existence was precisely one great aptitude for change. A great lover of music, she began playing the piano at the age of ten, a study that would have an important role in her “first life”. In 1938, due to the racial laws, she was forced to abandon school and study at home. Subsequently, her two older brothers were sent to Switzerland for safety and in 1943 the rest of the family also joined them with a night escape through the mountains, to avoid ending up in Nazi extermination camps.

Lisetta continues to study piano at the Zurich Conservatory. During her escape she had brought with her the collection of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, two volumes that keep her company in a period of sadness, loneliness, marginalization and search for a new identity. After the war he returned to Genoa, resumed his musical studies and graduated from the Milan Conservatory. Thus began his career as a concert performer in the 1950swith tours in Italy and abroad. She is a talented pianist, but soon her professional path unexpectedly takes another direction.

In Genoa, on 30 June 1960, in the midst of the unrest coinciding with the turn to the right of the Tambroni government, a general strike was held. Lisetta wishes to participate in the event but the piano teacher advises her not to go, to avoid probable clashes, the possibility of injuring her hands and jeopardizing her career as a pianist. She, as she said, replied that “if her hands were more important than the rest of humanity she would have stopped playing”. And so it was.

The second life as a photographer and the camalli in Genoa

He therefore chooses to take to the streets alongside the dock workers, stop working as a concert artist and start teaching piano. Taking advantage of the moment of reflection, he decides to accept the invitation of the ethnomusicologist Leo Levi to go to the Dauno sub-Apennines, in the province of Foggia, to document the musical repertoire of hymns and songs of the Jewish community living in San Nicandro Garganico (founded by Donato Manduzio in 1920). Instead of the Well-Tempered Clavier this time he has with him an Agfa camera (Silette series) and nine rolls of film. His photos capture images of children, landscapes, streets, houses with an almost musical rigor and rhythmperhaps inherited from her study of the piano, shots that won numerous appreciations and pushed her to dedicate herself to images.

She works as a stage photographer at the Duse Theater in Genoa with the task of taking photos during rehearsals and developing them the same evening so that they can be distributed to newspapers. A job that won her over definitively, her commitment and dedication even led her to set up a darkroom at home. After three years and after having acquired great technical skills and the sensitivity to capture the most expressive images, she decided to leave the theater to immerse herself in real life. She works for the municipality of Genoa, dedicating herself to social reporting and she frequents the cultural society managed by Enrica Basevi who commissioned one of the services that would make her known internationally. This is the “Genova Porto” project, begun in 1964 and which became an important investigation denouncing the inhuman working conditions of the “camalli”, the longshoremen. It’s not easy for a woman to enter that environment, so Lisetta pretends to be the cousin of a port worker, curious to see how the port works. He shoots practically secretly, immortalizing the gestures, the bodies, the effort, offering a unique testimony to that very harsh reality: none of the workers wear overalls or protection, they enter the cold rooms half naked in the winter, while in the summer they carry frozen beef quarters on their shoulders, but also phosphates and dangerous goods. The result is a traveling exhibition promoted by Filp-Cgil, which uses his shots as a means of knowledge and denunciation, an exhibition that ends in the Soviet Union.

Lisetta manages, from 1960 to 1978, to do what other photographers achieve throughout their lives and with the aim of giving voice to the poor. He said: “I’m Jewish and I know what it means to be discriminated against.” Genoa is the backdrop to another important project which saw her involved for six years and which became her most famous, courageous, still innovative and highly relevant work today. It all began on New Year’s Eve 1965 when her friend Mauro Gasperini invited her to take part in a big transvestite party. The photographer has a Leica with her and does not miss the opportunity to capture images of the house, of the people, of the objects, to try to understand why those men wanted to be women and why, precisely because of this desire, they were considered different and persecuted by Church and society. She begins to frequent that environment, the alleys of the former ghetto, between Piazzetta dei Fregoso and Via del Campo, to enter their homes, establishing a relationship of trust and friendship. From that project, in 1972, the book was born The transvestites (Ed. Essedi) at the time the subject of scandal but today considered a cult volume, with the photos featured in exhibitions that have toured the world.

His obstinate desire to give voice to the least is found above all in the portraits taken in Israel, Europe, India, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Morocco and Mexico, exhibited in international exhibitions. Like the recent ones at Villa Bardini in Florence and at the Estorick Collection in London, curated by Gianni Martini, custodian of all Carmi’s work, considered by the Financial Times among the ten best exhibitions of 2023. And then there are the prizes. Among these, the prestigious Prix Niépce for the series dedicated to Ezra Pound. They meet only for a few minutes, in Sant’Ambrogio di Rapallo, where the writer lives in solitude and welcomes the photographer without saying a word to her, wearing a black dressing gown and unkempt hair. She took around twenty images which were soon appreciated everywhere because they managed to fully capture the dramatic greatness of the poet.

The Indian guru and life in Cisternino

But there is another meeting that in 1976, ten years before the one with Pound, marks Lisetta’s life. During a trip to India, in Jaipur, he meets the master of the Hindu tradition Babaji who becomes her guide and gives her the spiritual name of Janki Rani: the first term is one of the names of Sita, the feminine aspect of the divine, while Rani means Queen.

When Lisetta returns to Milan she abandons photography to dedicate herself to artistic and philosophical activities, investing financially in the construction of Babaji’s ashram, the first in the Western world, which created in 1979 in the Apulian countryside, around Cisternino, an open spiritual center with the aim of being able to offer moments of peace and reflection. Right there she chooses to live her last years of life, those of a woman without taboos.

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