Portraits of women: the “foreigner” in the photographic work of Laura Grisi (1957-1990)

Abstract

This investigation examines the photographic research on female portraits by Laura Grisi (Rhodes 1939 - Rome 2017) during her travels in Africa, Oceania and South America, during which the artist developed her own visual reflection on the theme of the woman "foreigner" to Western canons in a rich documentation collected in various editorial projects, which, starting from the beginning of the 1960s, arrive at a retrospective synthesis in the study-interview edited by Germano Celant and published in Laura Grisi: A Selection of Works With Notes by the Artist (Rizzoli, 1990). The essay starts from the portraits published in the 1964 volume I denti del tigre (Lerici Editori), in which Laura Grisi portrays Polynesian women in both literary and visual form, constructing a narrative that initiates a reflection on the iconography of the non-European woman, read by her lens as an alternative to the established canons of patriarchal visual culture. The study then compares her portraits with those of her husband Folco Quilici, brought together the following year for Leonardo da Vinci in the latter's monumental work I mille fuochi dal Sahara al Congo. The book alternates the couple's shots of the customs and uses of the peoples of north-equatorial Africa, that place women among their privileged subjects, and offers a unique case study in which female identity, investigated in a context of cultural “otherness”, is recounted and constructed by the language of photography in a fruitful "mirror" formula from which the dialectic between the female and male gaze emerges.