Io, lei, l’altra

If women were posing as models, later they embraced their creativity actively. Portraits by men – such as Man Ray, Edward Weston, Henry Cartier-Bresson, Robert Mapplethorpe, just to name a few of the photographers presented in the exhibition – are juxtaposed with portraits and self-portraits of women artists and photographers, including Wanda Wulz, Inge Morath, Vivian Maier, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and Marina Abramović.

The portraits and self-portraits are an extraordinary photographic testimony of the difficult process of self-affirmation and the conquest of a new social identity by women artists in the twentieth century and the first years of the new one. Portraits and self-portraits are places of confrontation, but also of conflict between different expressions of identity. Conventional representation forms contrast with new ways of expressing one’s personality; the established roles of the representation of women, the repetitive poses borrowed from traditional portraits give way to new modes of expression.