Paola Agosti

Paola Agosti

Born in Turin in 1947, Paola Agosti began working as an independent photographer in 1969, a career that has taken her on many and varied voyages in Europe, South America, the United States, and Africa. She has met and photographed political leaders, men and women of culture, and artists of international renown. She has paid particular attention to faces and feats in the world of women. She has explored the end of a way of life for farm hands in the poorest regions of Piemonte, the vicissitudes of Piemontese emigration to Argentina, and has photographed the great protagonists of European culture of the 20th century, publishing several volumes on these subjects.

Since 1976 she has published numerous photo books and has exhibited her images (some of which now belong to the permanent collections of various museums) in Italy and abroad. In recent years she has also curated volumes dedicated to family memories, to individual histories that become History.

Finding Aid

To view a detailed listing of contents for the Paola Agosti Photographs and to request materials for consultation in the Beinecke Reading Room, visit the Online Finding Aid.

Print Holdings

With Maria Rosaria Ostuni, L'Italia fuori d'Italia: Immagine di emigrazione (Roma: Seconda
Conferenza Nazionale dell'Emigrazione, 1988).
With Silvia Bordini, Rosalba Spagnoletti, and Annalisa Usai, Riprendiamoci la vita: Immagine del movimento delle donne (Roma: Savelli, 1976).
With Fausto Fiorini, Alessandro Galante Garrone, Nuto Revelli, et al., Immagine del mondo dei vinti (Milano: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1979).
With Saverio Tutino, San Magno fa prest (Ivrea: Priuli e Verlucca, 1981).
With Licia Donati Perelli, La donna e la macchina (Roma: Edizioni Oberon, 1983).
Volto d'autore (Torino: Associazion per il salon del libro, 1988).
With Giovanna Borghese, Mi pare un secolo: Ritratti e parole di centosei protagonisti del Novecento (Torino: Einaudi, 1992).
With Barbara Tosi, Quattro madrigali di Marco Lodoli (Roma: La nuova pesa, 1993).
With Giovanna Borghese, C'era una volta un bambino: Ritratti e autoritratti d'infanzia (Milano: Baldini & Castoli, 1996).
Caro cane: Fotografie 1977-1997 (Milano: La tartaruga edizioni, 1997).
Virtualereale: Al di là delle cose: Visioni de quattro fotografi (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2001).
With Zoltán Nagy and Corrado Stajano, Grand Tour: 1973-2000 (Torino: Inside Out edizioni, 2001).
With Camilla Bergamaschi, Giorgio Agosti nelle lettere ai familiari dal 1915 al 1987 (Torino: Inside Out edizioni, 2004).
With Francesco Faeta et al, Fotografi e fotografie: Uno sguardo antropologico (Milano: F. Angelli, 2006).
With Michele Calandri and Alessandra Demichelis, Volta delle parole: Intelletuali italiani del Novecento (Monza: Scenaperta, 2007).
With Michele Calandri and Alessandra Demichelis, L'Edera e l'olmo: Storia di Livio, Pinella, Alda e Alberto Bianco (Cuneo: +Eventi, 2007).
With Marco Revelli, Bobbio e il suo mondo: Storie di impegno e di amicizia nel 900 (Savigliano: N. Aragno, 2009).
Paraíso: Entrada provisoria (Torino: Federazione italiana associazioni fotografiche, 2011).
With Sandra Sassaroli, The Time is Always Now (Torino, 2012).
Illaria Bussoni and Raffaela Perna, La Gesta femminista: La rivolta delle donne nel corpo, nel lavoro, nell'arte (Roma: DeriviAprodi, 2014).
With Antonella Tarpino and Beatrice Verri, Il destino era già: Le donne de L'anello forte e il mondo dei vinti di Nuto Revelli (Boves: ArabAFenice, 2015).

Related Collections

Online Resources

Paola Agosti is an Italian photographer whose work documents social movements, contestation, and protest as well as social and cultural change in postwar landscapes from Italy to South America, Cuba, and beyond.

Paola Agosti Photographs

The Paola Agosti Photographs document a variety of social and cultural landscapes in postwar Italy. Turbulence, upheaval, social contestation are frequent themes in Beinecke’s collection. But Agosti’s photographs also capture moments of personal drama, sudden flickers of humor, joy, sorrow, surprise, humility, frustration, gestures of friendship and solidarity alongside expressions of profound loneliness, fragility, and isolation, all playing out against the backdrop of a society in the throes of vast and momentous change. Feminist protests and gay liberation activists figure next to women workers in factories, emigrés from the South transferred to the vineyards of Piemonte, Piemontese cultural transferred to the landscapes of Argentina. The quiet beauty and personal hardships of cultures in transition and decline.

Collection Highlights

Italian Feminists of the 1970s

Protests and clashes with police; the act of creating posters and signs; self-proclaimed “witches” with broomsticks who defiantly “choose for themselves,” the Women’s House in Rome, assemblies, meetings, everyday life inside an urban commune.

Gay Rights Activists of the 1970s

Leaders of the magazine and movement F.U.O.R.I. (the acronym means ‘outside’); public and private displays of forbidden affection; moments of playful and joyous defiance; protests before a public both sympathetic and wary.

Women Workers in Italian Factories

Rows of women in beehive hairdos hammering away at typewriters; women with pneumatic wrenches on an automotive assembly line; strolling by men on lunch break at the Fiat plant; a young woman in a Micky Mouse t-shirt concentrates on a messy job; another caught up in the threads of a textile mill; others still dwarfed by machines they manhandle; moments of hilarity, friendship, solidarity of single women in and outside the workplace.

The Lost World of Piedmontese Vineyards

Odd couples, women from the South coming to join farmhands from no local woman will marry; dilapitaded vineyards nearly deserted by youth seeking more promising work in the factories; the quiet beauty and terrible privation of ancient vineyards on the verge of collapse; domestic scenes of poverty, gestures of pride, despair, resignation; signs of religious piety; children at work on the farm

Piedmontese emigrants in Argentina; road signs with the names of Piedmontese towns out in the Argentine scrub brush; cowboys with lassoes; a stalwart farm wife in the pasture; a small shirtless boy sitting on a pool table in the local tavern; old couples at a village dance; a young woman in her wedding dress; desolate streets and stray dogs.

Women Workers in Cuba

Women rolling cigars in factories; laughing on their breaks; typing at desks beneath a portrait of Castro; proudly posed in front of a television in the family parlor.

Piedmont in Argentina