MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of RomeSalario-Nomentano

Marialba Russo: Sguardo rovescio

Now showing24 September 2026 – 31 January 2027€6

The pioneering photographer's first major Italian museum retrospective, presenting seven foundational 1970s bodies of work that intertwined artistic practice with visual anthropology and social observation.

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On now All of October 2026

In a restaurant on 29 September 1974, two young men back from the sanctuary of the Madonna di Monteverde got up and danced together, and Marialba Russo photographed the whole thing in sequence. She later printed it as a book on a machine built for preserve-jar labels in Torre Annunziata, to get past the publishers' censors.

This is the first big Italian museum show for the photographer from Giugliano, near Naples, and its seven 1970s series turn a woman's camera on men. You walk past carnival cross-dressers in make-up, a man in drag acting out childbirth, and 130 men shot only from behind, told apart by coat, hat and posture. One series has no men in it at all: red-light film posters on the streets of Naples and Aversa.

The €6 ticket (€4 for ages 7 to 26) covers all of MACRO, which is closed Mondays. A second part, on her 1971 Madonna dell'Arco fieldwork, is at MUCIV, Museo delle Civiltà.

Look for

Al ristorante, il 29 settembre 1974
Look for the sequence of two young men dancing in a restaurant, their bodies getting looser and closer from frame to frame.
Travestimento (1975-80)
Look for 34 close-up portraits of men dressed and made up as women for carnival in Avellino, Benevento, Naples and Salerno.
Il Parto (1978)
Twelve close, fragmented shots, some black and white and some colour, of a man in drag faking a birth with convulsions and shouting, until the disguise drops.
The 130 figures from behind (1981)
Look for a catalogue of men's backs, necks, jackets and hats, with no faces, where only posture and clothes hint at who they are.
L'espulsione del male (1974)
Four hard-shadowed photographs from Galatina of a man on the ground at the climax of a tarantism healing rite, a ritual usually led by women.