Lisetta Carmi

Do tranvestites yield a social service? Are they the emphasized and exasperated expression of an old-fashioned (or which is becoming old-fashioned attitude, which considers a woman as a commodity?
Do they foreshadow, in a paradoxical and contradictory way, a new means of conceiving (or abolishing) the roles assigned to men and women?

I happened to enter transvestite enclave in 1965 during a New Year’s party. Later on, I met them from all the contradictions of our society, as a minority used and driven apart in the same time.

But not by chance, my taking an interest and a share in their problems enhanced an each-other confidence, affection and understanding which allowed this work, extending beyond the usual relation between photographer and photographed subject.

At that time I myself was not so much the question of accepting a ‘status’ as of refusing a ‘role’.

Transvestites (or rather my relation with them) helped me to accept myself as I really am: a person who lives without a role of his own.

By observing transvestites, I realized all that is masculine may be also feminine, and viceversa. There is no forced behavior, except in the authoritative tradition we are taught since our childhood.

But who really are the transvestites?

Why – apart from a livelihood – do they desperately long for woman condition? What is the meaning of woman myth to them? And what is ‘the woman’? I mean not only for them, but for their customers, too.

It is difficult to answer all these questions: but they are as well alive and present in our time, as creating a crisis in man – woman relations.

Lisetta Carmi

Lisetta Carmi
(Genoa, 1924)

In 1960 Lisetta Carmi abandoned her music and concert activity to devote herself to photography. The 1960s and 1970s recorded collaborations, assignments, reports linked to Genoa, to the socio-cultural ferment and to the contradictions that animated the city, but also travels around the world. Until 1979, when Carmi would abandon photography, after meeting in India the spiritual master Babaji Herakhan Baba.

Among the projects linked to Genoa and social denunciation there is the work on Travestiti (Transvestites), whose attention and reception in the international artistic context is indeed being consolidated only in recent years.

The work begins on the evening of the New Year’s Eve in 1965, when Lisetta Carmi participated with her friend Mauro Gasperini in a party for “transvestites” in the Jewish ghetto in Genoa, between Via del Campo and Piazza Fossatella, and she photographed them in their different moments of life, capturing attitudes, ways of being, relationships. She then returned to visit them and show them the first prints she had made. Thus she began to frequent them, establishing a friendship that led her to know them as well as each other in depth.

The camera becomes the means to highlight the repressed and the marginal, through a necessary interference that forms the basis of an authenticity of story and relationship.

This cycle will become the material for a photographic book that saw the light in 1972 and was destined to become a publishing scandal as well as to circulate in a clandestine way.

Published by Sergio Donnabella, who founded Essedi Editrice for the occasion, the graphic layout was entrusted to Giancarlo Iliprandi, the editorial consultancy to Luciano D’Alessandro, while the interviews with the portrayed characters are carried out by the psychiatrist and pedagogist Elvio Facchinelli.

The work on Transvestites leads Lisetta Carmi to a profound knowledge of herself, as a woman, beyond an externally imposed role and a sexual identity that rigidly pigeons gender. In fact, her work triggers a reflection on the impossibility of containing the complexity of human sexuality into a binary sexual proposition between man and woman.

Being a woman therefore implies a becoming, a continuous construction, a re-signification through an interrogation and an investigation of the self that starts from an anthropological and psychoanalytic exploration.

An investigation that subverts the stereotypes of that “sexual racism” identifying woman with femininity and man with masculinity, preventing the manifestation of the deep essence of an identity.

Lara Conte