Public Sex - Marialba Russo
Marialba Russo's collection of photographs of Italian pornographic film posters from the 1970s, questioning both the original images and their subsequent exhibition.
Naples, late 1970s. In the streets of the city, scandalous and indecent posters suddenly appear, only to be covered just as quickly by new images. Within two years, the censors made them disappear for good. The posters were taken from pornographic films, featuring naked, obscene and tempting female bodies. They essentially referred to the determinations of male desire, carried by the dominant macho imagery of the time.
Marialba Russo was immediately intrigued by these images and decided to photograph them. Her search soon became as obsessive as it was methodical, constituting a systematic collection, a heterogeneous corpus of diverse shots, poses and looks, all linked by a cartoonish and comic (or tragic) eroticism, determined by an overtly one-sided male representation.
What motivated the actions of a woman who, in the late 1970s, photographed posters taken from pornographic films? Curiosity or anger? And above all, what could the exhibition of these images mean? Is it a way of ridiculing them, or of neutralizing the masculine ritual of pornographic films, or on the contrary of amplifying their effect, accentuating the tendency to reduce the female body to the sole object of desire? These are some of the questions raised by Marialba Russo's work, which two critical essays (by Goffredo Fofi and Elisa Cuter) attempt to answer in this book, prompting the reader to question the representation and perception of women's bodies, the significance of the exhibition and the way it addresses and influences gender issues in our society.
Published by NERO + Centro Pecci 2021
15 x 18.4cm
168 pages
ISBN: 8880561324
Marialba Russo's collection of photographs of Italian pornographic film posters from the 1970s, questioning both the original images and their subsequent exhibition.
Naples, late 1970s. In the streets of the city, scandalous and indecent posters suddenly appear, only to be covered just as quickly by new images. Within two years, the censors made them disappear for good. The posters were taken from pornographic films, featuring naked, obscene and tempting female bodies. They essentially referred to the determinations of male desire, carried by the dominant macho imagery of the time.
Marialba Russo was immediately intrigued by these images and decided to photograph them. Her search soon became as obsessive as it was methodical, constituting a systematic collection, a heterogeneous corpus of diverse shots, poses and looks, all linked by a cartoonish and comic (or tragic) eroticism, determined by an overtly one-sided male representation.
What motivated the actions of a woman who, in the late 1970s, photographed posters taken from pornographic films? Curiosity or anger? And above all, what could the exhibition of these images mean? Is it a way of ridiculing them, or of neutralizing the masculine ritual of pornographic films, or on the contrary of amplifying their effect, accentuating the tendency to reduce the female body to the sole object of desire? These are some of the questions raised by Marialba Russo's work, which two critical essays (by Goffredo Fofi and Elisa Cuter) attempt to answer in this book, prompting the reader to question the representation and perception of women's bodies, the significance of the exhibition and the way it addresses and influences gender issues in our society.
Published by NERO + Centro Pecci 2021
15 x 18.4cm
168 pages
ISBN: 8880561324
Marialba Russo's collection of photographs of Italian pornographic film posters from the 1970s, questioning both the original images and their subsequent exhibition.
Naples, late 1970s. In the streets of the city, scandalous and indecent posters suddenly appear, only to be covered just as quickly by new images. Within two years, the censors made them disappear for good. The posters were taken from pornographic films, featuring naked, obscene and tempting female bodies. They essentially referred to the determinations of male desire, carried by the dominant macho imagery of the time.
Marialba Russo was immediately intrigued by these images and decided to photograph them. Her search soon became as obsessive as it was methodical, constituting a systematic collection, a heterogeneous corpus of diverse shots, poses and looks, all linked by a cartoonish and comic (or tragic) eroticism, determined by an overtly one-sided male representation.
What motivated the actions of a woman who, in the late 1970s, photographed posters taken from pornographic films? Curiosity or anger? And above all, what could the exhibition of these images mean? Is it a way of ridiculing them, or of neutralizing the masculine ritual of pornographic films, or on the contrary of amplifying their effect, accentuating the tendency to reduce the female body to the sole object of desire? These are some of the questions raised by Marialba Russo's work, which two critical essays (by Goffredo Fofi and Elisa Cuter) attempt to answer in this book, prompting the reader to question the representation and perception of women's bodies, the significance of the exhibition and the way it addresses and influences gender issues in our society.
Published by NERO + Centro Pecci 2021
15 x 18.4cm
168 pages
ISBN: 8880561324
