Abstract
This study presents an analysis of photographs found in a private album of a Jewish family from Rome, compiled over a 100 years ago, during a period of historical times for Italy and for the Italian Jews. The family had lived during the Risorgimento, the movement for the unification of Italy that led to the consolidation of the different Italian states into the single Kingdom of Italy. in 1870. For Roman Jews (Ebrei Romani), the Risorgimento resulted in liberation from a life of crushing poverty, disease, and abuse under the Papal State. The study explores how liberation from ghetto life and emancipation influenced image-construction and photographic portraiture of Roman Jews through an analysis of this family album. It expands on the ways of constructing a new visual social reality that involved photographic portraits of a new, free life in typical European bourgeois fashion, showing sitters for portraits in private studios at their best. Photography enabled the Jews to take family photographs and self-portraits that served as a sign of social standing, and integration into Italian society. The aspiration for a new self-image pushed the Ebrei Romani to defy gentile historical conventions and traditions of portraying Jews in a dismissive, humiliating form, as poor and ragged, or as comic figures. The Jews had relocated and acquired work, position, status, and wealth. The study explores the forms of documentation of this social and cultural metamorphosis from the angle of private family portraits of the Baroccio family, who had lived in the ghetto.
Presenters
Edna Barromi PerlmanSenior Lecturer, Visual Literacy, Kibbutzim College of Education, Israel
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Photography, Society, Portraiture, Emancipation
