"You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur", so speaks Margaret Atwood, the celebrated canadian writer best known for The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace, in her novel The Robber Bride. Atwood implies that even when women look at themselves or at other women their gaze is still a "man's gaze". A gaze generations of women introjected during centuries of female segregation and male dominion.
The young italian photographer currently based in Paris Ludovica Anzaldi, who tries to represent "human beings in all their complexity, their darkness, their poetry and sensuality", takes on women's portraits with a totally unique approach. In her last work called Human Range, she shows her female models "not as the fruit of the vision of others but rather as the object of their own desire. In society that is still deeply mistake where beauty criteria are defined on the basis of models that deny reality and where the appearance weighs more than the being and the messages focus on the body and its beauty; born the desire to tell the story of beauty and reality without false pretexts [...] breaking down the fear of revealing ourselves, the social pressure to express ourselves, and taboos".
Anzaldi's Human Range is an on-going project consisting of a series of snap-shots, a video, a short film and a book with more than 100 pictures craftly portraying average women in their "true colors" and with a singular "female gaze" reminding of Annie Leibovitz's best works. Despite her young age, Ludovica Anzaldi has been selected by Artpil among the 30 best photographer under 30 for her praised reportage on Calais's migrants, and her works has been exposed at the Italian Institute of Culture in Osaka and at the Biwako Biennale.
A peculiar, passionate and promising artist whom we will hear a lot more about.