The Wulz Sisters' Defiant Lens Gets a Global Spotlight

A feature in The Guardian this week has turned an international spotlight on the Wulz sisters, Wanda and Marion, the pioneering Italian photographers whose studio in Trieste became an unlikely site of resistance during the fascist era. The article, titled 'The cat that fought Mussolini: how the Wulz photography sisters weaponised the family pet,' details how the pair defied the regime's rigid gender norms by photographing dancers, fencers and other celebrated women of the 1920s and 30s.

According to the piece, the sisters' work was a quiet but pointed challenge to a society in which, as the Guardian quotes the academic Federica Muzzarelli, 'women were not free. They were regarded as mothers and homemakers.' The article highlights how even their cat, Mucincina, was enlisted as a prop in their subversive studio portraits, a playful yet defiant gesture against the unbridled patriarchy of Mussolini's Italy.

For a region like Tuscany, whose very identity is built on the Renaissance image of womanhood — muse, madonna, merchant's wife — the Wulz sisters' story resonates as a corrective. It reminds us that the Italian female gaze has a long, combative history, one that the international press is only now beginning to fully appreciate.