In images, in picturesFrom the liberation movements of the 1960s to the #metoo wave, the American has taken pictures of families given over to male violence, with which she has mixed self-portraits and scenes from her intimate life. His work has helped to change the law in the United States.
In his eyes, women are “sacred”, and Holy, the work that the American photographer Donna Ferrato devotes to half a century of struggle for their rights, intends to recall this. With violence, sometimes. With emotion, often. At the top of the book, the cover of which is crossed out with sexist insults, a triangle connects “Mothers, sisters and daughters” in the same space ” Holy “. A reinvented trinity.
Since the 1960s, the septuagenarian has followed the upheavals of the emancipation of women in the United States. From the birth of the liberation movements to the #metoo wave, she paints a dark portrait of this long road, which combines domestic violence, exploitation and sexual abuse. She also denounces religion as a vector of male domination. A fight that she sums up in a credo: “Against submission to the patriarchate, to men, to priests, to the president. “
Slap seized on the fly
At the heart of her work, we discover women subjected to male violence and torn families. The image does not always show the drama, but we can guess it in a look or the darkness of the cliché. Others are more explicit and hit the mark: a slap seized during the flight, a crying mother testifying in front of a police officer, an injured person transported on a stretcher, the look of a beaten woman, who killed her husband in a situation of self-defense and was sentenced to fifty years in prison.
The intimacy of the scenes may come as a surprise, but Donna Ferrato spent a lot of time with her ” topics “. Seized in a moment of fragility and vulnerability, his images nevertheless seem to show the strength of the victims. A tribute to their resilience.
In the very political preface by Holy, Documentary filmmaker Claudia Glenn Dowling, her alter ego, recounts in a few scenes the extreme encounters and experiences they shared, accompanying a family victim of a violent father imprisoned, tracking white supremacists from Missouri, living in the heart of sex clubs from Los Angeles. The two women have kept in touch with some families over the decades.
Right to abortion
In the book appears a portrait of Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author of The Scarlet Handmaid, work in which women were reduced to sexual slavery by men. A consistent reference with the entire book. Donna Ferrato’s commitment to the right to abortion and the right to dispose of one’s body is reflected in many photos, as does her advocacy for the rights of the LGBTQ community.
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