Italian Women Photographers and Self-Portraiture in the 1970s

In the 1970s, Italian women photographers and artists turned to self-portraiture as a feminist practice to challenge male-dominated visual culture. Paola Mattioli, in her 1978 text for the collective volume "Ci vediamo mercoledì. Gli altri giorni ci immaginiamo" (published by Gabriele Mazzotta), articulated the need for women to reclaim their image from the male gaze. Mattioli created a photographic sequence where she hides behind her camera, referencing Ugo Mulas but using a cut-out silhouette that spins like a Calder mobile to explore perception. Libera Mazzoleni's series "Le streghe" (mid-1970s) superimposes her photographic portrait onto 16th-century witch-hunt engravings from Francesco Maria Guazzo's "Compendium Maleficarum," connecting her identity to persecuted women. Tomaso Binga (born Bianca Pucciarelli) produced "Scritture viventi" in 1976 with photographer Verita Monselles, posing naked in the shapes of alphabet letters to critique the construction of femininity through language. The article by Raffaella Perna highlights how these artists used photography to recover marginalized histories and assert subjective identity, linking personal experience to collective feminist struggles.