Public Sex by Marialba Russo

Naples, late 1970s. On the city’s streets, scandal erupted in paper form. Explicit posters appeared overnight and vanished just as quickly, replaced by new images in a fleeting cycle that lasted barely two years before censorship shut it down. Pulled from pornographic films, the posters flaunted naked bodies—provocative, obscene, impossible to ignore. Yet they revealed more than women’s bodies alone: they staged male desire, power, and a bluntly macho visual language.

Marialba Russo was drawn in immediately. What began as fascination became method. She photographed the posters discreetly, almost clandestinely, turning obsession into an archive. The result is a heterogeneous body of work—different poses, gazes, framings—held together by an exaggerated eroticism that teeters between comedy and tragedy, and by a starkly one-sided, male gaze.

Why would a woman, in the late seventies, choose to photograph images taken from porn films? Out of curiosity, or anger? And what does it mean to show them again? Is exposure an act of ridicule or amplification? Does re-presenting these images dismantle the rituals of male-dominated pornography, or does it risk reinforcing them—feeding a visual culture that reduces women’s bodies to objects of desire?

These are the tensions at the heart of Russo’s work. Through critical essays by Goffredo Fofi and Elisa Cuter, this book invites readers to question how women’s bodies are represented, what it means to expose images at all, and how such acts continue to shape—and unsettle—our understanding of gender today.

The volume is co-produced by the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato.

• 15 x 18.4 cm
• 168 pages
• Softcover

Artist: Marialba Russo

Published By: Produzioni Nero