The Intimate Lives of Genoa’s 1960s Trans Community

Photographer Lisetta Carmi who sensitively documented the lives of her friends

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters issue 8 with the headline ‘A Sense of Community’.

Lisetta Carmi, I Travestiti, Genova
 (The Transvestites, Genoa), 1965–71
 photograph. Courtesy: © the artist,
Galeria d'arte Martini & Ronchetti,
Genoa, and Galerie Antoine Levi, Paris 

 In Pictures: Juliet Jacques profiles the phots The Intimate Lives of Genoa’s 1960s Trans Community

Carmi’s portraits are intimate and empathetic, giving the subjects a rare chance to reveal themselves: sometimes literally, as in the photograph of an unnamed transvestite hitching up her skirt to expose the top of her stockings, or another pulling down a part of her dress to reveal her breast, the lighting and angle (most likely deliberately) making it impossible to tell if she is a cross-dresser or transsexual. 

The important thing, which Carmi manages to convey, is her subjects’ mixed feelings: not about their gender identities, but about the joy of finding a time to express it, and about capturing it in a photograph that will record a moment that cannot be permanently lived, at least not without painful social consequences. Such bittersweet emotions frequently spring from loneliness, but Carmi was careful to portray something often absent from early representations of trans women: a sense of community. Her subjects are seen helping each other with their dress and make-up, smiling and hugging one another, tenderly expressing their love for each other in their bedrooms, or enjoying the embrace of a man.

After meeting a guru in Jaipur in 1976, Carmi founded an ashram in Cisternino three years later and retired from photography altogether in 1984.

 Her images of Pound may have remained famous, but her portraits of the previously voiceless trans women of Genoa deserve to be far better known – slowly, the world is starting to see the same humanity in them, and people like them, as did Carmi.