"And yet there remain magnificent women artists to seize from obscurity. Top of Art Review’s Power 100 list for 2023 is Nan Goldin, whose “Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, documenting LGBT+ subculture, shocked in New York back in 1985. Who knew that Lisetta Carmi had got there decades earlier — and in patriarchal Italy? In two excellent exhibitions, her lurid but loving 1960s colour photographs of Genoa’s transgender community, plus crystalline black-and-white chronicles of the port’s dockyard and steel workers, were revelations: for their formal brilliance, immediacy, humanity. Carmi died aged 98 last summer; for me she was the discovery of the year."
December 19, 2023