From Tina Modotti to Gerda Taro, a book is coming out on 10 great 20th century female photographers

Coming out on February 3 is the book titled 10x10. Stories of Women Photographers, edited by Nicolas Ballario: the volume, published by 24 Ore Cultura, follows the success of the miniseries of documentaries also promoted by 24 Ore Cultura for Mudec in Milan and dedicated to the story of ten great female photographers of the 20th century. The book will also tell the lives, art and anecdotes of ten protagonists of the photographic art of the 21st century.

Beginning with a selection of their most successful and famous images, the book will tell the story of the passing of the events of the great pioneers of twentieth-century photography: from Dorothea Lange with her shots of America prostrated by the Great Depression to Gerda Taro with her tragic, untimely end in the Spanish-American War, via Margaret Bourke-White, among the first photographers to set foot in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and Claude Cahun, whose work brilliantly anticipates such modern-day issues as those related to gender and sexual identity. Then again Lisetta Carmi, a photographer almost forgotten for decades and rediscovered at a very late age. Then there are authors dedicated to their own original research, such as Tina Modotti, divided between art and political commitment, and the versatile Imogen Cunningham; up to the present day, with great artists such as Cindy Sherman and Vanessa Beecroft, who use photography as a privileged medium of expression of their inner world and expressive research, and Nan Goldin, who “photographed the infotographable,” challenging a society that was not ready to be confronted with the crude reality.

The book, explains curator Nicolas Ballario, “is not intended to be a compendium of women’s photography and certainly does not have the ambition to offer a synthesis in this sense. We have chosen ten women whose practice changed the history of photography and did so from an uncomfortable position that wanted them gregarious.” The women artists recounted are women and photographers with very different personalities; uniting them, however, is their vanguard: having been ahead of their time, challenging a world and a system, that of art, which is profoundly masculinist, in which men almost always dominate.

The book’s author, Nicolas Ballario, is a curator and television and radio host, studied photography at the John Kaverdash School in Milan and attended the Altieri Academy in Rome. He joined Oliviero Toscani’s staff and is an expert in the marriage of art and mass media. He collaborates with Radio Radicale and Rai Radio 1, and in 2019 he co-hosted with Oliviero Toscani the program Camera Oscura, broadcast on La7 in two special episodes dedicated to the discovery of photography and its secrets. He currently edits the art section of Rolling Stone Italia.

Image: Imogen Cunningham, Martha Graham, 1931

From Tina Modotti to Gerda Taro, a book is coming out on 10 great 20th century female photographers

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