Ghitta Carell was born in Hungary in 1899 to a Jewish family of modest means, arrived in Italy as a young woman, and became one of Rome’s most sought-after portrait photographers. Intellectuals, actors, generals, political leaders, fashionable women, members of royalty and the middle class all came to sit in her studio. Carell, who died in Haifa in 1972, spent most of her working life recording a society as it wished to be seen.
Her black-and-white pictures were made with a view camera and finished by hand. Carell’s touch was delicate and, at the same time, reductive: she worked by subtraction, lifting away the superficial layers of a face until something less guarded appeared. The result is a kind of unmasking, in which a likeness is only the beginning and character is the real subject. The photographs look soft and luminous, but the judgment behind them is exact.
The book, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2024, is edited by Roberto Dulio and Maria Sica. Dulio teaches the history of architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and has written and curated on Carell before, including a 2013 study of her photographs and exhibitions devoted to the architects she portrayed; Sica has spent her career in Italian cultural diplomacy, serving at the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow and later directing institutes in Zagreb, Stockholm and Tel Aviv. Their involvement places Carell inside twentieth-century artistic and architectural culture rather than in the narrower history of studio portraiture. The 128-page hardback brings this body of portraiture into a focused publication.
Bringing these images together allows viewers to consider the consistency of Carell’s method across different sitters. The portraits hold a double interest — as finely made objects and as records of a political and social world that commissioned its own image. That a Jewish woman, Hungarian by birth and Italian by naturalization, produced likenesses of figures from that establishment gives the pictures a historical weight beyond their elegance.
