"Fotografia e album di famiglia: percorsi identitari e proiezioni dell’immaginario"

In the fifth and final meeting of the seminar series "Donne con la macchina fotografica (e un quaderno, un foglio, una penna, un laptop...)", Federica Muzzarelli (University of Bologna) will speak about photography and family albums.

In the use of photographic images—either appropriated as ready-mades or produced authorially—and contained within albums, scrapbooks, photobooks, or diaries, often combined or assembled with other photographic material as well as with different media such as drawing, painting, and writing, a practice that can be defined as feminist and resistant has been explored since the second half of the nineteenth century. This has occurred regardless of whether such experiences took place outside, alongside, or within the official history of art, tracing the stages of a path that reveals one of the many facets of photography: its role as a privileged medium for expressing autobiographical, personal, and first-person narratives, as has happened whenever art and the creative process have become inextricably intertwined with existential dimensions and pressing psychological needs.

The meeting will take place in person. It will be possible to arrange a virtual room upon request for valid reasons (physical distance, study commitments abroad, health conditions, etc.) by writing to ficlit.textl@unibo.it in order to receive a personal invitation link.

Federica Muzzarelli is Full Professor of History of Photography at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna. She coordinates the research center FAF (Photography Art Feminisms). As Principal Investigator, she led the PRIN 2020 project “Italian Feminist Photography: Identity Politics and Gender Strategies.” She co-directs (with Claudio Zambianchi) the journal piano b. Arti e culture visive and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the series FASHION, MEDIA AND CULTURE: PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL LIFESTYLES (Bloomsbury). She is a member of the board of the National PhD program “Image, Language, Figure.” Her main research interests focus on the relationship between photography and feminism and on the role of women photographers in contemporary history and culture. In September 2025, she coordinated the international conference “Photography and Feminist Aesthetics: Italian and Transnational Perspectives” (University of Bologna). She is the author of monographs, essays, and scholarly articles on her research topics, which also inform her conference presentations, lectures, and exhibition curatorships in public and private institutions.

The meeting is organized in collaboration with the FAF Research Center – Photography Art Feminisms.