The Wulz Sisters: Pioneering Feminist Photographers in Fascist Italy

Italian sisters Wanda (born 1903 in Trieste) and Marion Wulz inherited a multigenerational photographic studio and turned it into a platform for artistic independence. After their father Carlo photographed them as children, they began producing self-made images that blended reality and imagination. Their most celebrated work, *I + Cat*, superimposes Wanda’s face onto the family cat, using a mid-19th-century double-negative technique in a way that foregrounds female identity and freedom. The sisters also created portraits of each other—Marion captured Wanda in motorcycle goggles and as Cleopatra, while Wanda photographed Marion in designs by fashion designer Anita Pittoni.

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During the 1920s and 30s, Italian women were officially confined to domestic roles. The Wulz studio, however, became a hub for “modern women” who danced, played sports, and practiced gymnastics. Their clientele included painter Leonor Fini, Olympic fencer Irene Camber, and other artists, writers, and actors. According to curator Federica Muzzarelli, the sisters used photography to keep the idea of women’s emancipation alive amid “unbridled patriarchal ideology.” Their 1932 participation in the National Exhibition of Futurist Photography marked the only Futurist foray for Wanda, yet the sisters continued to champion a feminist aesthetic throughout the 1930s and 40s.

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The Estorick Collection in London will open *Wanda and Marion Wulz: Avant-Garde Photography in 20th-Century Italy*, curated by Muzzarelli. The show presents both original negatives and finished prints, highlighting the sisters’ technical mastery and their role in an informal female salon that also hosted designer Anita Pittoni. Director Claudia Baroncini of the Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia, which holds the sisters’ archive, notes that the exhibition demonstrates Marion’s active participation in documenting the liberation of Trieste in spring 1945, when she photographed arriving Allied tanks from her apartment terrace.

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• “They photographed modern women, dancing, playing sports, doing gymnastics,” — Muzzarelli. Women

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• “They were very clever with negatives,” — Claudia Baroncini, director of the Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia

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• “These images show she was fully part of the artistic partnership,” — Baroncini. Although

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The sisters worked together until the 1970s, but financial pressures forced the studio’s closure in 1981. Wanda died in 1984; Marion continued documenting their joint legacy in diaries until her death nine years later.

The Guardian