I travestiti. Fotografie a colori, published fifty years after the original I travestiti (Rome, Essedì, 1972) and a few months after the author's death, is a volume Lisetta Carmi herself strongly wanted: unpublished colour photographs from one of the most intense and important reportages in the history of photography, rediscovered in her archive in 2017. These images make up a broad and complete body of work that allows a new reading of Carmi's long engagement with the community of travestiti in Genoa. At the end of 1965, for the New Year party, a friend invited her to a house of travestiti who lived and worked in the former Jewish ghetto in the historic centre of Genoa. That same evening she began photographing them, starting a friendship and a regular association that lasted until 1971. The following year Sergio Donnabella published the book I travestiti for Essedì, a publishing house created specially for it after other publishers had refused it: a pink album halfway between art book and investigative book, explicit between harshness and sobriety, with texts by Carmi herself and by the psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli and a layout by Giancarlo Iliprandi. The work on sexual identity contained in its pages seemed to most people far too shameless, and the very choice of the title, which reveals an unacceptable stance, caused scandal: many bookshops refused to sell it, and the volume became a publishing case and an outrage to the morals of the time. Contrasto now publishes the unpublished work, with a selection of 94 images in which the photographer recounts in an intimate and involved way the lives of the travestiti and, through them, also questions the role society wants to impose on them. Carmi exploits the communicative power of colour to bring out the truth through the concrete physicality of her subjects; the search for truth is the supreme guideline of her whole practice. The pictures document the long preparation of make-up and hairdressing and the phases of dressing, from images in bra and suspender belt to the shot in which these people finally show themselves to the world as they would like to be received. To be represented means to exist, to have bodies, faces, names. Carmi goes further and photographs the travestiti who, in pioneering times, had begun a path of transition, walking through the city outside the boundaries of the old Jewish ghetto, which for too many of them was protection but also prison. They are the first step of a path that is still long and painful, and her lens gives them back normality and beauty. Edited by Giovanni Battista Martini, the volume includes texts by Juliet Jacques, Vittorio Lingiardi and Paola Rosina, who reconstructs the history of the 1972 book.