Milan, 1970. A woman strides across Piazza Duomo, cutting through a crowd of men in suits and ties. Gianni Berengo Gardin made the picture, and it now serves as the iconic image of ‘LIBERE! 1946–2026. Women’s Achievements’, an exhibition conceived and curated by Renata Ferri at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan and promoted by iO Donna. Fifty photographs trace eighty years of women’s emancipation across public and private life, work, family, feminism, professions, sport, the body and social norms.

The core of the show comes from Publifoto, one of the leading Italian photographic agencies of the twentieth century, whose archive holds around 7 million images spanning politics, industry, current affairs and everyday life. Intesa Sanpaolo acquired the archive in 2015 and has since invested in its restoration and cataloguing. ‘Intesa saved Publifoto,’ notes Ferri, underlining the fragility of Italy’s major photographic archives. Pictures originally made for news coverage now hang as historical documents and collector’s items.

The question of who stood behind the lens gives the exhibition an institutional edge. ‘Publifoto had eight female photographers on record,’ Ferri explains. Across the archive, where many shots remain anonymous, 45 women’s names appear, mostly attached to images the agency distributed. For decades, as the curator points out, social photography and photojournalism remained predominantly male domains.

Photographs and words run in parallel. The visual journey opens in the Lodi area on 17 March 1946, with a group of women fresh from local elections. A Timeline curated by Valeria Palumbo carries the story into the present with recent data on gender inequality, including the Global Gender Gap Report 2025, which shows Italy dropping five places against the previous year. A different register enters with Marcella Campagnano, a leading figure in Italian feminist photography. Her series ‘Ruoli (1974–1980)’, also presented at the Venice Biennale in 1995, dramatises the identities imposed on women and exposes the stereotypes attached to them. ‘I wanted Campagnano in the exhibition at all costs,’ says Ferri. ‘Her work introduces a different language to the exhibition compared to documentary photography.’

The market tells its own story about who gets valued. Berengo Gardin, among the most prominent Italian photographers at auction, saw two vintage prints from the 1970s sell at Finarte last April for €1,016 and €1,270, with a 1988 print fetching €3,048. His work is held in the Contrasto archive and the Gianni Berengo Gardin Archive. The secondary market for Paola Agosti — active in political and feminist photography since the 1970s, and present here with two images — remains thinner: a vintage print of ‘Femminismo’ sold at Finarte in 2020 for 179 euros, while four prints of ‘La donna e la macchina’ carried estimates between 700 and 1,000 euros in 2021.

At the centre of the exhibition hall, a separate section titled ‘Del corpo delle donne’ shifts from document to symbol, with seven videos by female artists working across photography, publishing and art. Marilisa Cosello (Galleria Studio G7, Bologna; works priced from 1,800 to 10,000 euros) probes the relationship between the female body, workplace discipline and gender stereotypes in her video 9to5. Eleonora Agostini (Cartacea Galleria, Bergamo; photographs and videos up to 4,000 euros) builds ‘A Study on Waitressing’ on her mother’s experience as a waitress, examining gestures and power dynamics in service work. That project also produced a photobook published by Witty Books in 2024 — 38 euros, now sold out — which won the Aperture–Paris PhotoBook Award.

Different languages and generations meet here, all questioning how female roles, bodies and identities are constructed and represented. With the exhibition spanning 1946 to 2026 and closing on the stark figures of the latest gender gap report, Ferri frames emancipation as an unfinished narrative — one the Publifoto archive, rescued and catalogued, will continue to inform.