Francesca Alfano Miglietti – författare

From the hyperreal to the fragmentary: the body in contemporary art This thematic catalog contains more than 110 works by 34 international artists exploring new frontiers in depictions of the human body, exploring themes of life and death, youth and old age, work and migration, loss of balance and bodily life in the time and space of the present. From works by well-known hyperrealists such as Duane Hanson, John DeAndrea and Carole Feuerman, it proceeds to other types of narration where the body is evoked rather than represented. In works such as Christian Boltanski’s Prendre la Parole (Speaking Up), Ibrahim Mahama’s John B B, Chiharu Shiota’s Over the Continents, Dayanita Singh’s Suitcase Museum and Charles LeDray’s Mens Suits, the body seems to have vanished, leaving behind only traces. Fragments of the body and its mutation, and even the mutable conditions of society, are present in the works of Oscar Munoz, AES + F Group, Yael Bartana, Alfredo Jaar, Janine Antoni, Robert Gober, Marc Quinn, Andres Serrano, Robert Longo, Michel Rovner and Franko B.

The artists featured in this book offer us their own interpretations of the world, filtered through the camera, and show us what is worth looking at among the barrage of images that bombard us. Their strength is the ability to combine languages: not only photography, but elements of cinema and painting as well. Through Women's Eye showcases a number of great artists, from Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin to Bettina Rheims and Letizia Battaglia, along with many others. Their images are a collection of views that pass through moments of fleeting joy and moments of sorrow, moments of levity but also of passionate lyricism, that speak of empathy for the fellow human beings and of harmony, which are the true subjects of life.

Over 300 newly published works by Letizia Battaglia (born 1935), one of Italy's most celebrated photographers, are collected in this major new survey spanning the entirety of her 30-year photographic career. In photographs and contact prints from Battaglia's own archive, the book offers a comprehensive review of her work's civically engaged model for photography, typified by her iconic depictions of political protests and Mafia killings in her native Palermo in Sicily, taken while Battaglia was employed as photography director at the leftist daily newspaper L'Ora. Including affecting portraits of subjects such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, the mob boss Leoluca Bagaere and the Sicilian politician Piersanti Mattarella (assassinated by the Mafia), the photographs in this collection showcase Battaglia's attention to the most decisive events in Italy, both political and cultural, along with non-newsworthy records of the daily lives of people in Palermo.