Federica Muzzarelli, "Photography and Family Albums: Journeys of Identity and Projections of the Imagination"

In the fifth and final session of the seminar series 'Women with a Camera (and a Notebook, a Sheet of Paper, a Pen, a Laptop, etc.)', Federica Muzzarelli (University of Bologna) will discuss photography and family albums. The use of photographic images, whether taken as ready-mades or created authorially, contained within albums, scrapbooks, photobooks or diaries, and mostly in combination with other photographic material or elements of a different nature, such as drawing, painting and writing, has been practised as a form of resistance since the second half of the nineteenth century. This has occurred regardless of whether the experience took place outside, alongside or within the official history of art, revealing one of the many facets of photography: its role as a privileged vehicle for capturing autobiographical, personal and first-person narrative needs whenever art and the creative process become inextricably intertwined with the existential dimension and pressing psychological needs. 

Federica Muzzarelli is Full Professor of History of Photography at the Department of Arts, University of Bologna. She coordinates the FAF (Photography, Art, Feminisms) Research Centre. As Principal Investigator, she coordinated the 2020 PRIN project ‘Italian feminist photography. Identity politics and gender strategies’. She edits (with Claudio Zambianchi) the journal piano b. Visual Arts and Cultures and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the series FASHION, MEDIA AND CULTURE: PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL LIFESTYLES (Bloomsbury). She is a member of the National Doctoral College "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 books, essays and academic articles on her research topics, which also feature in her conference papers, lectures and curatorships of exhibitions in public and private institutions.

The event is made in collaboration with FAF - Research Centre on Photography Art Feminisms.