Lisetta Carmi: Identities review – radical photography reveals Italy’s outsiders

Estorick Collection, London
Carmi’s 1960s photos of marginalised people, from sex workers to stevedores, have a piercing humanity

She was an accomplished concert pianist who later became a devoted yogi, but Lisetta Carmi is best known for the 18 years she spent taking photographs. Her carefully observed, quietly sensational pictures had a subtle power to them: they reckoned with Italy’s traditional, patriarchal society.

Carmi’s piercing humanism is the focus of this concise, lucid exhibition at the Estorick Collection. Neatly organised into two rooms are images from Carmi’s two most important bodies of work. The first draws together a selection of black and white images from three series, taken between 1962 and 1976, of workers at the Italsider steel mill in Genoa, the cork factory at Calangianus, Sardinia, and of stevedores working on the shipyards at Genoa’s port – an area of the city usually closed off to women (Carmi pretended to be a relative of a docker to gain entry).