It is always wonderful to know the reason driving the creation of a photography collection, but interest is surely heightened if the collector – Donata Pizzi – is also a photographer with a thirty-year career behind her, and that the minimum common denominator guiding the collection is that it will accept only shots by Italian, female photographers.

After spending a few years working abroad, Donata Pizzi is very much aware how little space Italian photography occupies on the international stage, and how much less women photographers do; this is a gap she wants to fill by printing a large collection of photographs and photography books, all the work of women. (The collection’s official starting date, 1 January 2015, was when she acquired a photograph by Lisetta Carmi.)

Today the collection contains over 250 works, from which were selected the sixty photographs that make up this exhibit, to be shown at this year’s SIFEST. They comprise a specific yet at the same time a slant look, chronological and conceptual, of what has been created by women’s photography over the last fifty years. The core of the collection is devoted to benchmark artists like Letizia Battaglia, Giovanna Borgese, Lina Pallotta, and Paola Agosti, who told important fragments of Italian history, and younger figures like Simona Ghizzoni, Isabella Balena, and Francesca Volpi. The story of the feminist revolution, as told in an ironic key by Tomaso Binga and Lucia Marcucci, is not missing, but what has been given the most space in this show, becoming in fact the centre point of the collection, is without doubt the contemporary gaze, showing how in the last ten or twenty years photography has knocked down the barriers surrounding pure representation, becoming a powerful tool in the artistic search – Marina Ballo Charmet, Paola de Pietri, Alessandra Spranzi, Marzia Migliora, Moira Ricci, Bruna Esposito, just to name a few of the artists on show.

When one looks at an art collection one often wonders what sense of affinity is shared by the selected works, and then one understands, here in this collection as never before, that the unifying factor is the creative act of the collector, who determines that the approach to be taken will be the point where these gazes meet, the compitum, to remain in dialogue with the theme of SIFEST26, the place where extremely diverse styles and formats meet and open the possibility for a fuller, deeper investigation. It becomes clear that in this collection, as in any complex system, the interwoven stories go to show something greater: courage, sensitivity, mystery (that Pizzi herself says are the yardsticks used to select the works) and the impression that the heritage of feelings and concepts enriches itself again at each look, as if in a virtuous circle  stretching out towards infinity.

Looking out towards the future it would also be worth hoping that major photography collections like this one put together by Donata Pizzi might find their way into the world of museums here in Italy as well, along with sculpture, painting and videos.