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Marialba Russo’s collection of photographs of Italian pornographic movie posters from the 1970s, which examines both the way we view the original images and the way they were subsequently displayed.
Naples, late 1970s. Scandalous and indecent posters suddenly appeared on the city streets, only to be just as quickly covered up by new images. Censorship made them disappear for good within two years. The posters were taken from pornographic films, featuring naked, obscene, and seductive female bodies. They essentially reflected the determinations of male desire, driven by the dominant macho imagery of the time.
Marialba Russo was immediately intrigued by these images and decided to photograph them. Her research quickly became as obsessive as it was methodical, constituting a systematic collection, a heterogeneous corpus of various shots, poses, and gazes, all linked by a caricatural and comic (or tragic) eroticism, determined by a manifestly one-sided male representation.
What motivated the actions of a woman who, in the late 1970s, photographed posters from pornographic films? Curiosity or anger? And above all, what might the exhibition of these images signify? Is it a way to ridicule them, or to neutralize the masculine ritual of pornographic films, or, on the contrary, to amplify their effect by accentuating the tendency to reduce the female body to a mere 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 movie posters from the 1970s, which examines both the way we view the original images and the way they were subsequently displayed.
Naples, late 1970s. Scandalous and indecent posters suddenly appeared on the city streets, only to be just as quickly covered up by new images. Censorship made them disappear for good within two years. The posters were taken from pornographic films, featuring naked, obscene, and seductive female bodies. They essentially reflected the determinations of male desire, driven by the dominant macho imagery of the time.
Marialba Russo was immediately intrigued by these images and decided to photograph them. Her research quickly became as obsessive as it was methodical, constituting a systematic collection, a heterogeneous corpus of various shots, poses, and gazes, all linked by a caricatural and comic (or tragic) eroticism, determined by a manifestly one-sided male representation.
What motivated the actions of a woman who, in the late 1970s, photographed posters from pornographic films? Curiosity or anger? And above all, what might the exhibition of these images signify? Is it a way to ridicule them, or to neutralize the masculine ritual of pornographic films, or, on the contrary, to amplify their effect by accentuating the tendency to reduce the female body to a mere 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
