A few years ago, the phrase “Attenzione pickpocket” went viral in the voice of Mónica Poli, an Italian woman who, tired of pickpockets plundering the tourists visiting Venice, decided to become a sort of street vigilante whose shout not only alerted victims but also sent the pickpockets fleeing in terror. Those characters who take advantage of crowds to slip their hands into the pockets of unsuspecting passersby know no territorial boundaries, as recorded by Luz Elena Castro, who with her lens captured the activity of female pickpockets on the streets of Medellín during the 1970s and 1980s. In Women Pickpockets (1984), the domestic and social role of women is demystified. The archetypal criminal of the collective visual imagination is not presented there, much less the seductive femme fatale who beguiles her victims; on the contrary, the thieves appear as mothers, aunts, grandmothers, or casual passersby, because in fact they are. These photographs do not judge their protagonists but rather give visibility to hidden yet latent scenarios and dynamics in everyday city life — dynamics that have scarcely found a place in the artistic representation characteristic of modernity. With this series, Castro contributes to expanding the thematic repertoire of art photography, to include in that grand narrative the outcasts, the invisible, and the unwanted, who are also part of Colombian reality and who are both symptom and symbol of what we still have to work on as a society.
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