Lisetta Carmi

Lisetta Carmi was born in Genoa on February 15, 1924, into a well-to-do Jewish middle-class family. Due to racial laws, she was forced to leave school in 1938 and take refuge with her family in Switzerland. In 1945, at the end of the war, she returned to Italy and graduated from the Milan Conservatory. In the following years, she held a series of concerts in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Israel. In 1960, she interrupted her concert career and accidentally approached photography, transforming it into a true profession. After conducting a comprehensive survey of the port of Genoa in 1964, which later became a traveling exhibition, she continued a reportage on Sardinia that began in 1962 and concluded in the 1970s. In 1971, she bought a trullo in Cisternino, Puglia. On March 12, 1976, she met Babaji Herakhan Baba, the Mahavatar of the Himalayas, in Jaipur, India, an encounter that would radically change her life. Over the years, she created a series of portraits of artists and cultural figures of the time, including Judith Malina, Joris Ivens, Charles Aznavour, Edoardo Sanguineti, Leonardo Sciascia, Lucio Fontana, César, Carmelo Bene, Luigi Nono, Luigi Dallapiccola, Claudio Abbado, Jacques Lacan, and Ezra Pound.