The photographers spotlighting the battle behind La Perla’s lace

True to Piazzi’s research-based strategy to image-making, the challenge takes its cues from Italian artwork historical past. At the center of the collection is a sequence of 12 images portraying the employees in procession, hand-in-hand. It attracts inspiration from Aurora (1614), a legendary fresco by Bolognese baroque painter Guido Reni. The scene depicts the Roman goddess of daybreak as she brings forth a brand new day, main the way in which for Apollo and the goddesses of time. “The metaphor felt especially apt to represent the La Perla workers’ ongoing struggle; months of remaining united, practising mutual aid, and holding fast to one another,” Piazzi explains.

The duo additionally seemed to Mexican muralism, “both for its political clarity and its capacity to merge realism with imagination”, in addition to the photographic work of Lewis Hine, August Sander and Diane Arbus. “Our references are never merely decorative – they’re always interpreted through a feminist and working-class lens, in tribute to a living, contemporary story.” 

The winning picture, considered one of 11 particular person portraits within the collection, spotlights Pierangela Cernera, a central determine within the Unicheunite, who has labored in La Perla’s slicing division for twenty-four years. On the day of the shoot, the photographers requested every girl to deliver an object from her workspace. “Piera brought scraps of La Perla’s world-famous lace and playfully draped them over her head, almost covering herself completely. In that gesture, the image emerged,” Piazzi recounts. “She would become our Madonna of the factory floor, with tailoring scissors in place of the cross, and her hand raised in a gesture of indication – an image suspended somewhere between Antonello da Messina’s Madonna and the cinematic figures of Aki Kaurismäki.”