Suzanne Santoro’s Black Mirrors and Slide Shows: the obscuring and revelations of history

In the history of international feminism, the name Suzanne Santoro is routinely mentioned for one work: the photographic booklet "Per una nuova espressione / Towards New Expression", published in 1974, through which she suggested that art history is marked by a taboo against the representation of female genitals. Here, I analyze other photographic series by Santoro that have received less critical attention than the booklet, although they were produced in parallel or expanded the same iconographic sources with greater thematic, formal, material, and spatial richness. These refer to the photographic prints attached onto wooden panels and covered with resin, realized between 1973 and 1981, including a group entitled Black Mirrors; and to the projections of transparencies-cum-mirrors, originally untitled, and described in the artist's notes as merely Projections or Slide show with mirrors, displayed between 1976 and 1979. In both series, the analysis of media manipulation and the iconological reading are interdependent. The material supports are not merely physical carriers of visual forms; their structure itself signifies the historiographical concept Santoro wished to evoke — namely, that history reaches us through stratifications and obscurations. My analysis, thus, proceeds first through a formal examination of image structure and then elaborates on their meanings.