The Wulz sisters: how two photographers defied fascist Italy

The Guardian's art and design desk has traced the career of Wanda and Marion Wulz, sisters who worked as photographers in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s—years when, according to the outlet, women were "not free" and "regarded as mothers and homemakers." The Wulz sisters defied that narrowing by shooting dancers, fencers and other accomplished women, as well as their cat Mucincina, in images that pushed against the unbridled patriarchy of the fascist state.

Photography in that era was itself a male-dominated field, and the sisters' decision to take up the camera and to frame women as subjects—active, skilled, dignified—constituted a quiet form of resistance. Their work documented a parallel Italy, one in which women occupied public space and performed at the limits of physical ability. The cat, too, became part of that archive: a domestic companion transformed into a subject worthy of the artistic eye, a small assertion of autonomy within the confines of fascist domesticity.