Sisters who shared one camera get first show outside Italy in London
A woman looks straight at the camera with a cat laid across her face. That playful double portrait is the entry point to a London show opening on 16 September.
The Estorick Collection in London is staging Wanda and Marion Wulz: Avant-garde Photography in 20th-Century Italy, which runs to 20 December. It is the first exhibition outside Italy to tell the sisters' story, according to The Art Newspaper.
Wanda (1903–1984) and Marion Wulz (1905–1993) were from northern Italy and started taking photographs in the 1920s. They belonged to the third generation of Studio Wulz in Trieste, a family business opened in the 1860s by Giuseppe Wulz. Their father Carlo's daughters, Wanda and Marion worked at the studio between 1928 and 1981.
The show moves from family snapshots to polished studio portraits. Its particular focus is how the sisters pictured themselves as independent, modern women between the First and Second World Wars. Every print comes from the Wulz archive held by the Fondazione Alinari per la Fotografia in Italy.
That archive has only recently been fully sorted. A first reorganisation, inventory, restoration and digitisation project began in 2023. It prioritised 5,165 negatives made by Wanda and Marion.
The two sisters worked closely. They shared a single camera. Wanda moved in avant-garde circles, a term for artists pushing past traditional styles, and met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism, in 1932. Futurism was an early 20th-century Italian movement obsessed with speed, machines and breaking with the past.
In that same year Wanda showed I + Cat at the National Exhibition of Futurist Photography in Trieste. The work superimposes, or layers, a photograph of a cat over her own face. Marion's eye turned outward during wartime. She photographed Second World War scenes from the windows of the Palazzo Hierschel in Trieste, where the studio was based.
The venue fits the subject. The Estorick Collection, at 39a Canonbury Square, opened in 1998 and is Britain's only gallery devoted to modern Italian art. Its core collection runs from 1890s figurative painting to Futurist work of the 1950s. The gallery shop will stock an exhibition catalogue, and a guided tour tied to the Art History Festival is listed for 17 October 2026 from 10:00 to 11:00.
What makes this stand out is access. Most visitors will never have seen these names before. Here they get a family firm, two careers and one shared camera, pulled together from thousands of negatives into a single visit.
