Donna Ferrato’s incomómo archive links to PhotoFest de Palma

Ojala te enfurezcan. That is ultimately the only honest advance warning exhibition Holy de Donna Ferrato, who inaugurates Casal Solleric de Palma. These images are not meant for you to enjoy, they are not needed for full understanding. They are there to inconvenience, to emphasize something inside, to record the violence that happens when we look the other way.

Donna Ferrato (Ohio, 1949) did not go to this place for theory, until impact. In 1981, while doing a report for a magazine, a man shot and killed his wife. Look no further. Hizo photography. That moment was the beginning Life with the enemy. One of the most influential series of contemporary documentary photography. From the beginning, the camera did not stop showing.

Located in Mallorca PhotoFest and organized by Tomeu Coll, the exhibition in Palma has continued and spread worldwide. Holy (2020), a compendium of visual representations about the body, anger, pleasure and aversion. It is not a retrospective of use, but rather an accumulation of energy. Ferrato’s paintings, direct and without artifice, were long lost, but the same seems to be happening now.

There is something in the form of photography that deviates from the classical documentary tradition. Ferrato doesn’t observe if he means it. There is no shield on the camera, it is contact hardware. For years he worked among women who were in abusive relationships, in shelters, in transit areas.

He documented the injury, but also the progress of the reconstruction. “When the legs that showed me where they were, I looked into the eyes and kept the signaturesThere are no passive victims in these images, there are hearts that resist.

Holy It is in this sense that the exposition is moving towards the end. The photo shows how you give light at home in a state of ecstasy. Another, a heart marked by violence that does not diminish sight. Pain and pleasure coexist once and for all. “That’s the type of beauty I have,” comments Ferrato. There is no pleasant aesthetic, there is truth.

Commissar Tom Coll I’ll sum it up exactly: “The camera in the hands of a woman is transformed into a completely revolutionary tool”. And it’s not an empty metaphor. For years, Ferrata’s work has been tied to real structures to help battered women.

Photography does not end with an image, it continues with action. “I firmly believe in photography as a tool to change things,” Tomeu insists. This is not very common in the age of cynicism throughout the exhibition.

But Holy not if it only supports the complaint. I have a question that the job is like an uncomfortable ride. “Why do so many men hate women?” Ferrato doesn’t respond from a theory until history accumulates. The diagnosis is brutal. Gender violence as a system, as a cultural normality.

And yet what remains when the exposure rises is not just darkness. It’s a force. The women who appear in their images are not distorted. They sustain wonder, renew themselves, overcome violence, and transform it. Ferrato habla de revolution in terminos íntimos, a step where an insurmountable turn hits you.

At 76, the photographer continues to work with the same urgency. He says the camera is the language that returns when the palabras fall, that it weighs on him like an albatross, but that it’s also the only form he’s found useful. In a presence that I describe as confused and violent, it is impossible to retreat from the answer, only to follow it by sight.

In one of the images included in the museum, taken during a demonstration on March 8, 2019 in Madrid, many people occupied the streets. It’s not a standout scene, it’s continuity. Because something is clear Holy This is why the story that began in 1981 has not ended.

Donna Ferrato’s photographs cannot be considered in Casal Solleric. If atraviesan. And as you go up, there’s an uncomfortable, necessary feeling: seeing something that won’t let you look at it the same way until it furiously destroys you. This is the real power of photographing women.