Agnese De Donato was an Italian photographer and photojournalist, born in Bari and based in Rome from 1957 onward.She photographed Italian cultural and political life from the 1960s through the 1980s, with work spanning cinema, theater, dance, art, and the feminist movement. She was among Italy's first female photojournalists and co-founded Effe, the country's first feminist magazine, with other journalists.
In 1957 she opened the bookshop Al ferro di cavallo near Piazza del Popolo in Rome, which quickly became a meeting point for literature, photography, and art. The shop was frequented by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and Fosco Maraini, along with writers from the Gruppo 63 and young artists from the Piazza del Popolo scene. Goffredo Petrassi affectionately nicknamed her “l'allegra libraia”, the cheerful bookseller. She photographed artists in their studios or alongside their work, alternating vertical and horizontal framing and close and wide shots. Rather than working toward a predetermined image, she let the moment and her interaction with the subject guide her, leaving final choices of cropping and framing to the darkroom.
As a photographer she documented the cultural and political ferment of Rome, including the cantine scene, the city's underground theater and music venues of the 1960s and 1970s.She also photographed the feminist movement's struggles for divorce, abortion, and anti-violence legislation. Her photographs of these struggles were included in “The Unexpected Subject. 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy”, a 2019 exhibition at the FM Center for Contemporary Art presented during Milan Art Week.Her daughter-in-law, Francesca Dantini, was entrusted with her photographic archive of roughly one hundred thousand negatives, and has been digitizing and publishing the black-and-white images Agnese herself had printed in the 1970s and 1980s.In 2024, a digital collection titled Abstract Drifts was released under the same name on the launchpad Truffle, comprising ninety-five photographic patterns and five photographs of the interior of the Cloud, a building in Rome by the architect Massimiliano Fuksas.
