A protagonist of the neo-avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, Ketty La Rocca (La Spezia, 1938 – Florence, 1976) is presently one of the most appreciated Italian female artists on the international scene. Edited by Raffaella Perna and Monica Poggi and produced in collaboration with the Ketty La Rocca Archive and Galleria Frittelli in Florence, the book explores for the first time the artist’s relationship with photography, a fundamental language in her research. Since her beginnings, in the mid-1960s, La Rocca exhibited collages based on the montage of images and slogans taken from advertisements and magazines. In the following decade she focused on body language and turned to photography to create “a personal memory”, reworking historical photos through handwriting.
Beside the essay by Raffaella Perna and the vast iconographic section, the book is enriched by an anthology of the artist’s writings, including several unpublished texts dedicated to photography history and technique, “civilization of images”, and the links between photography and sculpture.
Contents
Ketty La Rocca. Word, body, photography: a journey between works and writings 1964-1976
Raffaella Perna
Visual Poetry
The performances: between art and life
The book as a research space
The body, the gesture, the word
The liberation of images
Anthology
Appendix