In September there was a huge debate on social media about Maimouna Doucouré's French-language feature debut "Mignonnes" (Cuties). The film is a modern coming-of-age story about a Senegalese Muslim immigrant girl living in the suburbs of modern-day Paris who makes friends with a group of girls and starts hanging around with them. The movie was attacked on social media by many people (who didn't even bother watching the film) who believed it was about a twerking dance crew of young girls and that it glamorised children's sexualisation. In the last few days there has been a story in the news in Italy that seems to have some connections with the reactions about "Cuties".
Italian phortographer Letizia Battaglia, famous all over the world for her brave black and white images of crime and Mafia killings in Sicily, took part in a campaign organised by Italian brand and manufacturer of luxury sports cars Lamborghini.
Entitled "With Italy, For Italy" the campaign is a celebration of Italy and a hymn to beauty in a difficult and scary year that saw the world ravaged by the Coronavirus pandemic and Italy becoming one of the hardest hit European countries.
Art director Stefano Guindani, a fashion and lifestyle photographer, selected 21 photographers to picture beauty in a journey through the Italian regions. A wide range of photographers was chosen, from artists who have a passion for streetstyle and design to photographers who specialise in social themes, art, architecture and the automotive sector.
Each of them presented their vision: some juxtaposed Lamborghini luxury sports cars to a sublime landscape, others to an iconic architectural landmark. Palermo-born Letizia Battaglia, selected to represent her region, Sicily, put the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ in the background and let her girls take centre stage. Battaglia, who is 85, has indeed been shooting portraits of young girls throughout her career.
Yet, judging from the reactions she got, most people who left comments about the images didn't really know her work: social media erupted with some people complaining about the fact the shoot wasn't in her trademark black and white tones (she actually took two different sets in black and white and in colour and Lamborghini chose the set in colour). Others stated that this was too commercial for her, even though fans of commercial campaigns disagreed, saying this wasn't commercial enough as the car is mainly in the background or blurred.
Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando, a friend of Battaglia who also served as town councillor for the quality of life in Palermo, asked Lamborghini to withdraw the campaign as the City Council never authorised it (the company actually asked for the permission to make a cultural and social shoot to celebrate the beauty of Italy, but the local authorities complained they never got the details about the campaign). According to the local City Council, the female body in these images was used for commercial messages and marketing purposes.
As highlighted above, Battaglia, often portrayed young girls in her shoots as they played, stood still in the street or stared back at the photographer with a sweet yet inquisitive look in their eyes. Battaglia has always loved taking pictures of young girls as she identified herself in them.
In this specific set she wanted these young and carefree girls to represent not a vision for the next Pirelli calendar, but hope and a metaphor for the future of Palermo. If you look at these images and you know Battaglia's work, you will find connections with previous photographs: the red-haired girl with the blurred car in the background, for example, is reminiscent of the young child in Battaglia's picture "Young girl with rose", took in Palermo in 1995.
But there are clear connections between these Palermo girls and other young girls living in other countries. The girl in shorts may be the Italian sister of Maimouna Doucouré's "Cuties": in one image she looks a bit bored; in another she's hugging a friend while around them there's the chaos of the city. In the background there's a blurred yellow Lamborghini, its colour creating connections with the restaurant sign behind the girls. The images are as simple as selfies, the main protagonists of the shoot aren't indeed the luxury cars, but unsophisticated girls in ordinary clothes because real beauty, raw beauty, is not sophisticated.
Lamborghini was happy with the results as they wanted the car to be an accessory of this campaign and not the real protagonist, after all, this story wasn't about selling cars, but about beauty in Italy.
In car campaigns and in the history of fashion there has always been a trend to portray a beautiful woman next to a car but this is not the intent of this campaign. As you may remember from a previous post, between the late '50s and early '60s, Vogue US published a series of Cadillac and Chevrolet adverts in which models donned designs inspired by cars. One of the Chevrolet ads featured a woman in a bright red design and stated: "Cherchez la femme en la Chevy. Look for the woman in a 1959 Chevrolet – and you'll find a woman in style!"
The fashion-cars symbolism became even stronger thanks to glamorous movies and film stars: Edward Quinn’s photographs offer a great chance to look at film icons such as Gina Lollobrigida, Grace Kelly, Alain Delon or Jane Fonda, standing next to or sitting behind the wheel of beautiful cars. Quinn chronicled through his images how cars became for many celebrities symbols of their iconic status and of their glamorous lifestyles.
Decades later visual artist Cheyco Leidmann populated instead his universe - a fantastically surreal, impudent and at times disturbing world born out of violence, obsessions and sex - of women's bodies wearing tight clothes in hyper real colours provocatively posing next to cars.
Battaglia's shoot is not a "donne & motori" (a theme that also Miuccia Prada explored in her S/S 2012 collection) themed cover for Italian magazine Quattroruote (its covers, as stated in a previous post, were characterised by two key elements - a car and a woman) nor it is an advert in the style of Chevrolet's "Cherchez la femme en la Chevy".
The shoot is about girls who, like the "Cuties" are in a limbo between childhood and girlhood, they long to become women, but they also hope to stay children for a little bit longer. It is not about girls dreaming of becoming the sex toy of a man with a luxury sports car, because that's what some men read behind these images.
For the time being, though, this opinion prevailed: Lamborghini removed the images from social media and while Battaglia wonders if the time has come for her to leave the International Centre for Photography (Centro internazionale di fotografia at the Cantieri cuturali della Zisa) that she helped founding and that she still manages, you wonder why young and carefree girls scare grown-ups - especially grown-up men - so much. But you also wonder why these men are never ready to stand up and attack those ones who really exploit the female body.
When fashion designer Philipp Plein posted on his Instagram account images of scantily clad ladies washing his luxury cars and playing around with sponges and water or provocatively posing on and around a Ferrari nobody screamed about the female body being sexually exploited (apart from Ferrari that, more concerned about their trademarks, sent the designer a letter stating "Ferrari's trademarks and model cars are associated in your pictures with a lifestyle totally inconsistent with Ferrari's brand perception, in connection with performers making sexual innuendos and using Ferrari's cars as props in a manner which is per se distasteful").
In 1982 Battaglia took a tragic picture of a sex worker killed in Palermo. Her name was Nerina and was killed by the Mafia because she had started dealing drugs by herself, disrespecting the Mafia laws. Nerina was killed in the small flat where she lived, together with two friends, but Battaglia's photograph allowed Nerina to keep on telling her story to other generations.
When we see Nerina's picture in galleries and at photographic exhibitions we do not scream in horror while we should definitely do so thinking about this tragic story of sexual exploitation, drugs and violence. Battaglia's images for Lamborghini represent new possibilities for the young girls portrayed, possibilities that 38 years ago were denied to women like Nerina, such as the possibility for a woman to dismantle the male gaze with her self-determination and live a happy and carefree life.
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