Martha Rocher

The first monograph on Martha Rocher (1920-1990), a Viennese photographer who moved to Paris in the fifties, then to Milan in the early sixties, whose physiognomy we recognise in some private shots and self-portraits in the mirror.

Two decades of which the photographer documents the fervent artistic and cultural scene, as shown by the more than 250 previously unpublished black and white shots from this phase of her career in the volume, selected from the more than 1,600 prints preserved in her private archive. The images reveal a surprising interpreter of Paris in the fifties and Milan in the sixties, who frequented very lively circles, at the centre of the experimental art scene, such as the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris or the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, and important art exhibitions such as Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme E.R.O.S. at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in 1959, or the 1956 and 1962 editions of the Venice Biennale. Rocher was appreciated by some of the most innovative artists of the second half of the twentieth century, including Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Hundertwasser and Takis, and among the Italians Emilio Vedova, Gianni Dova, Roberto Crippa and Lucio Del Pezzo. The photographer portrayed them at work or in their studios, and took some emblematic shots, such as those of Yves Klein in his studio, dressed as a judoka, or posing in front of his Anthropometries. She also portrayed some of the greatest exponents of the avant-garde: Sonia Terk Delaunay, Meret Oppenheim (and the famous performance Le diner sur la femme nue, 1959), Alberto Giacometti, André Breton, Oskar Kokoschka and Kees van Dongen.

The essays by Elsa Genovesi and Raffaella Perna, illustrated with a selection of catalogues and printed materials documenting the public circulation of the photographs, enlarge the view to a broader reconstruction of the artistic climate of those years, while Alessandro Nigro’s text explores the echoes and persistences of Surrealism in Martha Rocher’s poetic. The volume closes with a biographical memoir by Matteo Motolese.


The volume is part of the series of monographs Electaphoto, devoted to the best-known names in contemporary photography, but also to some who have unjustly remained in the shadows, unpublished, presented after careful studies. The series reconstructs, through a group of authors chosen to achieve an interdisciplinary approach, a cultural history of photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. These are books to read, as well as to look at and understand.