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.

The Wulz sisters' photographs survive as a record of how women navigated constraint. By the 1930s, Mussolini's regime had codified its vision of the ideal Italian woman—fertile, obedient, confined to the home—and the cultural machinery worked to enforce it. Yet the sisters' lens captured something the regime could not fully control: women in motion, women in command of their bodies, women engaged in pursuits that demanded skill and courage. The fencer, the dancer, the athlete—each photograph was an implicit argument against the state's prescription.

The Guardian notes that this lineage of artistic defiance under dictatorship speaks to the broader role of cultural work in resisting totalitarianism. The Wulz sisters did not produce manifestos or join underground networks; they worked within the constraints of their time, using the tools available to them—a camera, a studio, access to a certain circle of accomplished women—to create an alternative record. That their work has only recently come into fuller view reflects how thoroughly fascism tried to erase women from the historical frame, and how recovery of such archives depends on sustained attention from later generations of critics and curators.

For Italy's cultural institutions, the Wulz sisters represent a significant recovery: evidence that the country's artistic tradition includes forms of quiet resistance that operated beneath the regime's gaze. Museums and galleries across Italy have begun to revisit work produced under fascism with fresh eyes, asking what stories were suppressed and what voices the archive contains. The sisters' photographs—intimate, formally sophisticated, politically charged in their very ordinariness—invite that reconsideration.